by Emily Suvada
I stare at her. She looks young—because she is young. When Jun Bei last walked in this body, she was fifteen years old. She hasn’t aged, hasn’t stepped outside, hasn’t drawn a breath in three years now. The thought is horrifying, but it isn’t like the last two years have been a good time to be awake. She hasn’t had to live through any of the outbreak. The clouds, the doses, the horror of the plague.
The entire world has fallen apart, and she slept through it all.
“I’ve been figuring out what happened,” she says. “Mato was right—I’m the one who wiped those six months from my mind, and I think I did it on purpose. All I have from that time is a handful of VR files I saved before I wiped those memories, and I’ve spent the last week piecing together what made me do that.” She turns back to me, a flicker of nervousness in her eyes, then walks across the floor, stretching one hand down to me. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
I take her hand cautiously, letting her help me to my feet. Her skin is warm and damp, her grip surprisingly strong. My head spins as I stand, and there’s still a hum of pain in my chest, but my feet find their way across the lab as I follow her to the wall of screens. She seems completely unconcerned about the fact that she’s talking to me while we’re sharing a brain.
But of course she is. She’s known about me for weeks. She’s had plenty of time to process this if she’s been awake inside this body since I woke up in Marcus’s house. I’m the only one who’s thrown right now, trying to take this in.
There’s another person living in my mind.
“It took a long time to sort through the VR files in our panel,” she says. “I must have encrypted them during those six months that I wiped, because I couldn’t remember how to unlock them. I had to hack them all—it took days. Most of them were from when I was younger, but a few were from my time in the desert.”
She looks up at the screens, her eyes glazing. They flicker on, showing a mix of text files and 2-D footage. Novak’s face is on one, still calling for people to go into the bunkers. Another shows what looks like drone footage of Entropia. There are black trucks gathered outside the checkpoint at the marketplace.
“I managed to hook into Cartaxus’s satellite network through our panel a few days ago,” she says. “I’ve been trying to keep up to date with what’s going on out there.” One screen is dark, with a faint line of blurred light across it, like the view I’m used to seeing through half-closed eyes.
“Is that a feed from my ocular tech?”
“Our ocular tech,” she says. “You’re going to have to get better at sharing this body. I have audio too. Like I said, I’ve been trying to keep up to date. It was confusing to wake up in here and not understand what was happening.”
My stomach clenches. It must have been terrifying for her to wake up as a prisoner inside a body that she couldn’t control anymore. “I’m sorry,” I say, though the apology feels inadequate. I’ve taken her body. She’s lost everything.
She looks at me, surprised. “You have nothing to be sorry for. Whoever’s fault this is, it certainly isn’t yours.”
She turns to the screens and pulls up a clip that I recognize—it’s her fighting with Lachlan in the house in the desert. Her face is streaked with tears, her shoulders shaking. She’s screaming at him, and his arms are crossed, his face dark. There’s no sound, but it’s clear that she’s distraught about something.
“What were you arguing about?”
“The Origin code.” Jun Bei chews at her thumbnail, staring at the screen. Her shoulders are hunched beneath the blood-smeared sweatshirt. “Lachlan wasn’t really there. It was a VR call. I was trying to give him the code, but he didn’t want to take it.”
The skin on the back of my neck prickles. “Why would you give it to him?”
She closes her eyes, letting out a slow breath. “This clip is from the morning I wiped those six months. Mato said it was a mistake, but it wasn’t—not from what I can tell. I think I did something that I shouldn’t have, and I freaked out. I tried to give the code to Lachlan because I was planning on erasing it from my panel and wiping every memory of writing it.”
My blood chills. From what Mato said, it sounded like the six months Jun Bei spent in the desert were the best months in her life. She was just starting to heal from her time at the lab—starting to unpack the trauma of her childhood and move past the anger she’d been bottling up for years. She was getting better. She was falling in love. She was writing code that could change the world.
What could be so awful that it would make her want to erase those memories?
“Jun Bei, what did you do?”
She doesn’t answer. Just holds her arms tight around her chest, staring at the screen. She’s young and frightened, and she’s locked inside a body that’s been taken away from her. She’s woken inside a world full of detonating people, with no memory of how she got there. I can see in her eyes that she’s struggling to hold herself together. Leoben said she always threw herself into a coding puzzle whenever she was overwhelmed, and that’s exactly what she’s been doing.
She’s spent a week inside this room decrypting VR files, watching screens of the world outside, trying to figure out what happened to her. I can’t imagine how frightening it would be to wake up in here like that.
I step over to her, taking her shoulder, trying to keep my voice gentle. “You can tell me. What did you do?”
“It was a mistake,” she says. “I was trying to test the code on a bigger population and see if I could distribute it wirelessly. It was just a test, but I miscalculated.”
My breath stills. The signal tower. The sixty people who died. “Jun Bei . . . Did you kill those people?”
“It reversed,” she says, pleading. “You have to understand—the code can switch instincts on and off, and it was meant to run the other way.”
I don’t understand what she means about the code running the other way. Lachlan said the same thing after Sunnyvale—that the code could elicit the Wrath and also suppress it. But that doesn’t have anything to do with sixty people dying. “What instinct were you testing?”
“The only one that really matters,” she says, turning to me, a light in her eyes. “The one everybody wanted to find. They never thought of it as an instinct, but I knew it was. I knew I could use the Origin code to suppress it, but then all those people died.”
The screens beside me seem to pulse. “But instincts don’t kill you.”
“Sure they do. When doctors tell people they’re going to die, sometimes they do, even if the diagnosis was a mistake. Couples married for decades die in their old age within days of each other. Terminally ill patients will cling to life just long enough to see a loved one make it to their bedside. Those aren’t just coincidences, Catarina.”
I step back, looking between her and the screens, shaking my head. “No. Death isn’t an instinct.”
“But it is,” she says. “Don’t you see? Our bodies know how to live, and they also know how to die. Death isn’t just something that happens to us—it’s something our bodies do. People are still dying because coders don’t understand the problem. They’re trying to save people by altering what’s in their DNA, but that’s only half of it. The reason coders still don’t understand death is because some of its controls live inside our minds.”
I stare into Jun Bei’s eyes, swaying as the realization hits me. She didn’t mean to use the Origin code to kill those people—she meant to do the opposite. To keep them alive. She’s done what every amateur coder has attempted since the first days of gentech. She’s cracked the code that doctors have been working on since alchemists were trying to turn lead into gold.
She hacked Lachlan’s work—his attempt to remove humanity’s violent instincts—and turned it into a script to switch off death.
CHAPTER 36
I STEP BACK ACROSS THE lab, shaking my head. “This can’t be possible.”
But it is. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Anna was shot in the che
st. She died. I saw her body, felt her skin cool and her heart stop, watched her panel flicker off.
And now her heart is beating again.
Anna is the missing link—the key to unlock the mysteries of why gentech can heal our bodies when we die, but not bring back our minds as well. Whatever the equation of life and death is, it’s been solved inside Anna’s cells.
And Jun Bei figured it out too. She found a way to wrap up immortality in four million lines of code.
“That’s why I had to stop the bleeding in your chest,” Jun Bei says. She lifts one pale hand to her mouth, biting the edge of her thumbnail. “It wasn’t your body that I was worried about. It was your mind. There’s an instinct for death coded into all of us, and I needed to make sure that ours wasn’t triggered by that gunshot.”
“But how can it be an instinct?” I lean back against the wall, shaking. I wrap my arms around myself, glancing at the screens, the lab counter, the mountains through the window. “I don’t understand.”
“Instincts are links between the body and the mind,” Jun Bei says. “Gentech can take care of our bodies, but it can’t stop our brains from flipping the switch that’s triggered when we die. There’s a thread inside us, and it can’t be knotted back together once it’s severed. All the Origin code does is strengthen that thread. It’s still one piece of the larger puzzle of immortality, but it’s a very, very big piece.”
I close my eyes, tilting my head back. “This will change the world.” There’s almost no injury or sickness that gentech can’t cure given enough time, but plenty of people still die while their bodies are healing—while they’re bleeding out or desperately sick. This code could save them all. It could let them drift into death and wake them once their bodies are healed. It wouldn’t save everyone—not people hurt beyond repair—but this kind of code would radically change us.
We’d be practically indestructible. And it’s already been sent out to everyone as part of the vaccine.
“How can we use it?” I ask.
“That’s the thing,” Jun Bei says. She reaches back for the elastic in her hair, tightening her ponytail. “I don’t remember. I wiped the code from my memories and my files. I’ve been trying to read it, but it’s four million lines long, and it’s part of the vaccine—I don’t know which pieces of code are which. It could take weeks to unravel the rest. I don’t think Lachlan really knows how either, otherwise he would have done it already.” She lets out a breath of laughter. “He’s sent the Origin code out to everyone, but he doesn’t know how to use it. How ridiculous.”
I pace to the windows, rubbing at a chill on my arms. “Do we have it? I mean—can we die? Cole said I died when I took down the destroyers, but then I woke up. I just shot myself in the chest, and I’m pretty sure I’m alive right now too.”
“I don’t know,” Jun Bei says, following me to the window. “It’s not exactly something I’m keen to test. I probably had it installed before, back in the desert, but then Lachlan changed our DNA, and I don’t know how that affected us. I think Mato has it, though.”
I spin to her. “What do you mean?”
“Well, he seems quite reckless with his fractioning, and I probably would have tested the code on him when we were working together.” Her eyes soften for a moment, a faint blush coloring her cheeks. She notices me watching and turns away suddenly, striding back to the lab counter. “His heart stopped when he took down those drones, and Anna said it had happened before. I don’t know if he’s even aware of it or not, but I don’t think he can die. So now you understand what’s at stake. I was frightened of what I’d created before, but I’m not anymore. I made a mistake—”
“A mistake? You killed sixty people.”
“It was an accident!” she snaps. “I paid for it dearly. I almost died paying for it. I lost my body and half my mind trying to erase that code from myself so I couldn’t do it again. I don’t know how else I can pay for it except by trying to make sure that I save as many people as possible now. That’s why we need to work together. This code is going to change the world, but it won’t be a very good world if Cartaxus is running it.”
“That’s why I’m here,” I say. “Brink is launching flood protocol right now. Do you know how to stop it?”
She shakes her head. “All I can think of is hacking Cartaxus’s systems and trying to force everyone out of the bunkers. That would stop the attack, but it’d be madness. The civilians would blame the people on the surface, and there’d be even more divisions. I thought about trying to use the Origin code like Mato suggested, but I really just don’t know how.”
“No,” I say, “we can’t use that code as a weapon. You’ve created something to save people’s lives and build a better world. That world begins today, and I don’t want to start it off with forcibly changing people’s minds.”
“Neither do I,” Jun Bei says, her eyes locking on mine. She smiles, and a tremor shakes the room—a low rumble in the floor.
“What was that?” I ask.
“That was the implant,” she says, frowning. “It’s going to get worse the longer you’re here. I breached one of its walls to meet you like this. I don’t think it’ll hold for much longer. There might be another way for us to talk, but it’s going to take time. We don’t have long—we need to make a plan.”
“I was thinking of going after Brink.”
“I know,” she says, shooting me a grin. “I like the way you think. I wouldn’t mind seeing all Cartaxus’s leaders pay for what they did to me and the others, even if I’m not the cold-blooded killer Cole thinks I am.”
I pause at the bitter tone in her voice when she says Cole’s name. “You said you don’t remember those six months in the desert.”
She shakes her head, her eyes locked on the floor, but she doesn’t respond.
“Your last memories were at the Zarathustra lab. You . . . you were still with Cole.”
She wraps her arms around her slender shoulders and lifts her gaze slowly, giving me a sad smile. “I told you I thought you were a dream when I first woke up in here. But it wasn’t a very good one.”
“Shit,” I say, looking at the screens on the wall. One is from my ocular feed. She was seeing everything through my eyes. Cole and I together. Talking about her. Kissing. Driving hand in hand after I realized who I was.
Cole and I fell in love while Jun Bei was locked in this body, trapped, unable to do anything about it.
“You didn’t know,” Jun Bei says, as though sensing my horror. “Neither of you did. I was upset, but then you met Mato, and I’m starting to understand. I don’t remember the night I left the lab, and I don’t know why I left the others, but it’s clear that I did. I left Cole behind.”
“You were escaping,” I say. “You were alone. It’s not like you had anyone to help you.”
She shakes her head. “I had the scythe. I could have gotten them out too. But I didn’t, and I don’t remember why. I went to the desert, moved in with a boy, and learned how to rewrite my own mind. I must have chosen Mato—I must have loved him.” She pushes a hand back through her hair. “There’s still so much I don’t understand.”
Another tremor shakes the room—and this time it rattles the sample vials on the lab counter. Jun Bei’s face darkens. “We don’t have much time,” she says. “Killing Brink might stop this attack, but not permanently. There’ll be new leaders within days, and they’ll launch flood protocol again. We need to find a way to convince Cartaxus’s leaders not to kill us.”
I shake my head. “Forget the leaders. They don’t care about us, but Cartaxus has three billion people in its bunkers who don’t know that flood protocol is happening. They’re being lied to. I don’t think they’ll want this to happen in their name. If we can find a way to tell them the truth, they could stop this.”
Jun Bei nods, pacing back across the room to the window. “Maybe. But what makes you think they’ll care about us? They’ll be terrified of losing the vaccine.”
“Th
at’s exactly why we need to get through to them,” I say. “They need to hear the truth—that the vaccine is done. It’s finished. Cartaxus put all their hope into Lachlan and his code, and it wasn’t enough. This virus is too smart. Cartaxus has failed. It’s time for us to stop fighting each other and come together to beat this virus—Cartaxus and the genehackers. That’s the only way we’ll survive.”
Jun Bei nods, a light in her eyes. “You might be right.”
“So what do we do?”
She chews her thumbnail, glancing at the wall of screens. “Bring me to a terminal with a satellite connection. Something hooked directly into Cartaxus’s network. I think I might be able to stop this attack and send a message to the bunkers.”
“Okay,” I say.
The only terminal I’ve seen that looked like it has that kind of access is the one in Regina’s lab in Entropia. That’s the last place I want to go. She stole my hand.
But it might be the only way we can stop this attack.
Another tremor rolls through the lab, shaking the screens. Jun Bei strides over to me, gripping my arm. “I’m going to break the connection we’re using to talk. I might not be able to contact you for a little while, but I’ll be trying to help you as much as I can. Try not to die for real, okay? I don’t really like this body you’ve got us in right now, but it’s the only one we have.” She lets go of my arm, then looks over at me suddenly, a strangely vulnerable look in her eyes. “And don’t kill Mato. I don’t remember those six months with him, but I’d like to try.”
I nod. She takes my hand, her fingers gripping mine, and the room plunges into darkness again.
CHAPTER 37
THE DARKNESS SPINS ME LIKE a wave, hugging my senses, then spits me back into my body like a doll thrown against a wall. I roll to my hands and knees, pain shooting through the base of my skull and rippling down my spine.
Jun Bei is gone. There is no hint of her voice, no brush of her thoughts against mine. She’s been tamped back into a prison inside my mind. I can’t feel her presence, but I can sense the gap inside me now. A black void, warping the edges of my thoughts. She’s locked inside me, caged and helpless in her own body. A body that’s been twisted to look like someone else. She can see through my eyes and hear what I hear, but she’s helpless. The horror of the thought is as real and urgent as the pain inside my skull.