This Cruel Design

by Emily Suvada

  Jun Bei’s hands are clenched into fists, her face pale. She looks like she’s reeling from this almost as much as me. “So why didn’t you wake me up?” she asks. “Cat was alone. She almost died. We could have made it through the outbreak more easily if we’d been together like this.”

  Lachlan shakes his head. “You don’t understand, darling. You would have had to stay hidden from Cartaxus through the entire outbreak. You could never go back to them, not after you’d written the Origin code. They’d do to you what they did to me—recruit you as one of their scientists—and then they’d own you forever. If I’d woken you, you would have had to stay on the surface, but I knew it would be hell, and you’d already been through so much. Those two years would have mentally scarred you even more than your childhood did. I couldn’t bear to wake you up just to leave you stranded in a world locked in the grip of the plague.”

  “But you left me there,” I say, my voice breaking. “I was there the whole time.”

  “Yes,” Lachlan says. His eyes cut to me, and the abyss inside me creaks wider. “You were there to live through it, but then, during the decryption, you were supposed to disappear.”

  The room tilts, the edges of my vision blurring. I grab the wall beside me for balance. He wasn’t just going to wake Jun Bei up. That was never the plan. He created me to help her heal, but then he didn’t need me anymore.

  The command that glitched at the end of the decryption wasn’t just to wake her up.

  It was to kill me. I was supposed to die.

  I double over, choking for air. My heart feels like it’s being gripped in a fist. No wonder Lachlan never told me that he loved me at the cabin. No wonder he was never warm around me.

  I was nothing to him. Just thoughts in a body. A tool to keep Jun Bei alive.

  He made me into his daughter and made me love him just so that he could control me long enough to bring her back.

  He was always going to kill me.

  “No,” Jun Bei says, her voice breaking. “How could you? You monster. How could you want to kill her?”

  “She’s not real,” Lachlan urges. “This is your body, your mind. She was a placeholder. I didn’t think you’d have this much trouble moving past her. You’d reorganized your entire brain when you were at Entropia. You were ruthless with your mind—it was clearly a tool for you to use. I assumed you’d understand.”

  “Understand?” she spits. “You made a person inside me, and then you wanted my waking to kill her? Do you have any idea how horrible that would be for me?”

  “You were never supposed to meet her,” he says. “She was supposed to disappear right at the moment you woke. There’d be glimmers of memory from the outbreak, but you’d assume they were yours and that the vaccine had simply erased them. You were supposed to step back into your body and take it for your own. It should have been easy for you.”

  “You used your own DNA,” she says, her shoulders rolling in revulsion. “Do you know how violating that is?”

  “Yes,” he says. “That was the point. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for you to become yourself again. To recode your body and your mind back into the girl that you’re supposed to be. I couldn’t think of anything you’d find easier to do than wipe the face of the man who tortured you for your entire childhood.”

  I stare between them, unable to move, to speak. My chest is shuddering, my vision starting to waver. The man I thought was my father—the man I loved—is talking about me like I’m nothing more than a pawn to use and discard.

  “She’s a person!” Jun Bei shouts, seething. “How can you even talk like this?”

  “She’s an abomination,” Lachlan yells, gesturing at me. “You’re supposed to hate her, not defend her. She wears my face and thinks with my DNA. She’s a tool, and now her usefulness has come to an end. It’s time for you to take back what’s yours and assume your rightful place in this world.”

  I drag in a breath, trying to wrestle myself back under control. Every word from Lachlan’s mouth feels like a blade driven into me, but my pain is rising into anger. This man took everything from me. I look around the room for a weapon, but there’s nothing—just lab equipment, shelves of paper, and nanite vials.

  But I have a scythe inside my arm.

  “My time is over, darling,” Lachlan says to Jun Bei. “It’s been over for years, but this vaccine’s failure just proves it. I’ve failed Cartaxus, and I’ve failed humanity. But you can do what I cannot—I know you can. You are our greatest hope for ending this plague. I may have been part of the group who created gentech, but you were born from it. It’s as much a part of you as the DNA inside your cells. We’re on the edge of a new world—you’ve almost taken us there already with the Origin code, and I know you’re only just getting started. But now you need to fight, Jun Bei. You need to use this code the way it was designed—to cut away the Wrath.”

  I summon my cuff’s interface, searching through my panel for the scythe. I’ve used it twice now, but I’ve never done so consciously. I don’t even know what it’s called. There are hundreds of folders of Jun Bei’s code inside my arm. I scan through them desperately, searching for something I can use to hurt Lachlan.

  “The Origin code is mine,” Jun Bei says to Lachlan. “I didn’t write it to erase the Wrath, and I won’t use it on anyone against their will. I know better than anyone how it feels to have your choices taken away.”

  Gunshots echo from the hallway. Lachlan stiffens, then slides his hands beneath the limp body of the girl. I still can’t find the scythe. I cast around desperately, searching the shelves for a gun, a shard of glass, but there’s nothing.

  “I understand powerlessness more than you might think,” he says. “Cartaxus will be here soon if I don’t go to them right now. You can stop this attack, darling. I know you’ll do what’s right.”

  He lifts the girl’s limp body to his chest and strides toward the door, but Jun Bei blurs across the room, reappearing in front of him.

  “What do you mean—you understand powerlessness?” she asks. “What did Cartaxus do to you?”

  He doesn’t answer. He just stands there with the girl’s body clutched to his chest.

  Jun Bei steps back as though suddenly afraid. “Why did you change your face? You were born with red hair and green eyes.”

  A sad smile crosses Lachlan’s face. “I had to hide my DNA, which meant changing my face. I knew you’d sequence my genes eventually, and I couldn’t bear the thought of you realizing who I was. It would make it so much more painful for both of us to do the testing they forced me to do. It was easier for you to simply hate me and call me a monster, which I am. You’re so much like your mother, Jun Bei, but your green eyes are mine.”

  My blood freezes. Jun Bei steps back in shock, her lip trembling. Lachlan just shifts the body in his arms. “I’ll be doing what I can from the inside,” he says. “I’m so proud of you, my daughter. I can’t wait to see what you become.”

  His eyes blaze, locked on hers before sliding briefly to me, a hint of something almost like pain in them before he turns and pushes into the hallway, the lifeless girl’s body gripped in his arms. The steel door of the lab clicks shut behind him, and Jun Bei turns to me, shaking, tears sliding down her cheeks.

  Now that I’m looking, I can see the same lines in her face that I saw in the photograph—the curve of her lower lip, her hairline, the slope of her shoulders. Lachlan is there in her features.

  He’s her father. He’s our father.

  We’re the children of a monster.

  “No!” she says, her voice breaking. “No!”

  “Jun Bei—” I start, but she grips her hair in her hands, then doubles over, letting out a scream, and the genkits on the wall explode.

  CHAPTER 42

  I THROW MYSELF ACROSS THE floor, diving behind the table. The room fills with a cloud of choking black smoke, broken shards of plastic and glass hurtling through the air. I land hard on my side, the wound in my ribs hitting
the tiles, wrenching a cry of pain from me. I drag my shirt over my mouth, coughing, and crawl to my hands and knees.

  “Shit.” Jun Bei’s eyes are wide, staring at me. She’s kneeling beside me, her hands pressed to her mouth. “Cat, I’m so sorry. I just lost control.”

  I cough, sucking in a lungful of smoke that blazes down my throat. “You could have killed us.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says again. “But he’s my father. The things he did to me and the others—”

  “He’s my father too,” I say. “He’s hurt us all. He’s a monster, Jun Bei, but we’ve stopped him. Now we have to stop flood protocol.”

  She nods, her eyes still wide. “You’re right. Come on—we should hurry.”

  She stands and moves in a blur to the terminal, and I grab the table to wrench myself up. My ribs are aching, my eyes and throat stinging with the smoke wafting through the air.

  “Brink won’t wait much longer if he thinks he has us and Lachlan,” Jun Bei says, shoving the sleeves of her sweatshirt up to her elbows. “We’re going to have to work fast. I think I can stop this attack long enough to send a broadcast.”

  I lurch across the room to the terminal, fighting back a cough, and press the memory chip Dax gave me to it. The interface pops into my vision and a map of the world springs up, showing bunker locations, drone fleets, the population centers on the surface. I can see the entire file system of Cartaxus’s research division—files and project code names stretch out in front of me. Hydra. Zarathustra. Gemini. This is the raw architecture of Cartaxus’s network.

  “I’ll stop the drones that are controlling the clouds,” Jun Bei says, her eyes glazing. I feel a tickle in my mind as she dives into our panel’s memory. Files spin across my vision—the viruses I coded when I was working with the Skies, along with a dozen pieces of her code that I don’t recognize. She folds them together, weaving them into a single virus.

  But before she can launch it, the terminal goes black.

  She jolts out of her session. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.” My hand is still pressed to the screen, holding Dax’s memory chip against it. The power cables at the back are intact, and I can feel the terminal humming, but it’s not letting us into Cartaxus’s servers anymore.

  “Did you think it would be that easy?”

  I spin around. A sandy-haired main is standing with his arms crossed in the wreckage of the genkits Jun Bei blew up, watching me with an amused expression on his face.

  Brink.

  Cartaxus’s leader steps across the room, moving cleanly through the metal table in its center. He looks between Jun Bei and me appraisingly. “I had a feeling the unconscious girl in Lachlan’s arms wasn’t really the one we were looking for. I had to come and see for myself what made you so special. Now I’m starting to understand.”

  My fingers curl into a fist around the memory chip Dax gave me. Brink must have used it to track us somehow—there’s no other way he could have found us so fast.

  Brink’s eyes drop to my clenched hand, and he lets out a snort of laughter. “You shouldn’t take memory chips from people you don’t trust, girls. Crick was surprisingly easy to control. We have other copies of Leoben, none quite as special as him, but useful enough to make him expendable. Dax became quite cooperative when we explained this to him. His login isn’t going to help you now, and I’ve added more firewalls to our network that even Mato wasn’t able to penetrate while testing them. You’ve lost.”

  I grip the edge of the terminal, my fist tightening until the edge of the memory chip cuts into my palm. I don’t know how I could have been so stupid. I should never have trusted Dax. Now we don’t have a chance of stopping this.

  “You have to stop flood protocol, Brink,” Jun Bei says. “That’s all we want to do. You can’t kill the people on the surface—it won’t help you.”

  “We need to protect the vaccine,” Brink says.

  “You need to forget the vaccine,” I say. “It’s a dead technology. Even Lachlan admitted it—it’s not the way to save us. If we have a future, it lies with the genehackers and people willing to think outside the limits of their DNA. That’s the only way we’re going to beat this plague.”

  “You sound so sure of yourself,” Brink says, looking from Jun Bei to me. “I’d suggest you remember that our systems and protocols have kept three billion people alive for the last two years. Your genehackers have been dropping like flies on the surface. They’re chaotic where we’re steady. It might take us a while to beat this virus, but I can assure you we’ll do it. It’s unfortunate that so many of your kind are refusing to see the light and join us.”

  “The civilians in the bunkers deserve a voice,” Jun Bei says. She disappears in a blur of light, reappearing beside him. “You can’t keep leading them from the shadows. They should have the right to make up their own minds about something like flood protocol.”

  Brink tilts his head. “Civilians? We’ve housed and fed them for two years now. We’ve protected them and saved them from this virus. They’re not civilians anymore. They belong to us now, and Cartaxus isn’t a democracy—it’s a shield. We’re the only thing standing between humanity and extinction. I’d like the two of you to join us, but you’re not going to have long to make that choice. I’ll be deploying the scythe in ten minutes’ time. That’s long enough for you to make it to one of the transports here. You have a place at Cartaxus with your father—both of you. I suggest you consider taking it.”

  His image flickers and disappears. I slump back against the terminal, closing my eyes, letting the memory chip tumble from my hand. “Goddammit,” I say. “What the hell are we going to do now?” I open my eyes, expecting Jun Bei to be fuming.

  But she’s grinning.

  It’s a smile I haven’t seen on her before, but I recognize it from Cole’s sketches. Her eyes are alight with excitement. “When you threatened to kill Brink at the lab through his comm, did you mean it?” she asks.

  I straighten. “No, of course not. That’s impossible.”

  “That’s what I thought too,” she says. “But then he went into lockdown, and Mato said he stopped taking comms. I thought that was curious. Why would he hide if he thought it was impossible?”

  A flicker of hope rises through me. “What are you saying?”

  Her grin grows wider. “I’ve never tried hacking someone through a comm before. I didn’t really know what I was doing. But he was right to be afraid. Cartaxus’s comm system isn’t as secure as it should be.”

  “Are you saying you killed him?”

  “No,” she says, throwing her head back, laughing. “I couldn’t have if I wanted to. He’s set up a firewall to protect himself from the scythe—that’s the only reason he felt safe enough to comm us. But he should have thought it through, because I got this from him instead.”

  She lifts one hand, and an ID card appears above it, rotating slowly in the air. It holds the same information Dax handed to us on the memory chip.

  Jun Bei just hacked the leader of Cartaxus and stole his login credentials.

  “Holy shit,” I gasp.

  “Come on,” she says, still grinning. She blurs across the room, reappearing at the terminal. “It gets better.”

  I press my hand back to the screen. It blinks on, asking for my ID, and Jun Bei’s eyes glaze as she flicks the credentials to the machine. The same server interface we saw before unfolds again, filling my vision, only now I can see more—every file and archive and record. There are access protocols for the panels of the civilians in the bunkers. For the satellites. For the airlocks.

  Brink’s login has given us access to everything.

  “This won’t take long,” Jun Bei says, stepping up to the terminal, her eyes still glazed. I feel her mind slipping into the interface, skating through the military servers. She’s calling off flood protocol with a single command. There’s no need to hack the drones or the soldiers. Brink’s more powerful than that. His access lets us alter entire
structures within Cartaxus’s systems instantly.

  “I’m going to send out the patched vaccine,” she says.

  I move beside her, letting my own mind slip into the servers. I know the architecture of Cartaxus’s systems—I’ve hacked them countless times before—but I’ve never seen them as clearly as this. I can see Jun Bei moving through the science division’s files, searching for the patched vaccine, triggering its deployment through the satellites. I’m following a similar path, but I’m hunting through the military division, skipping through code banks, scouring them for a weapon they shouldn’t have.

  It’s hidden in a locked folder, but Brink’s access lets me see it.

  The scythe. A single command, and it’s gone.

  “That’s smart,” Jun Bei murmurs. “I sent the patched vaccine. We’re almost done. We just have to take down Brink.”

  “How?”

  She grins again, her green eyes sparkling. “I’ve changed his login credentials—that’ll stop him for a few hours—but by that time it won’t matter. I just sent this out to every screen in every bunker in the world and set it to play on a loop for the next twenty-four hours.”

  Footage appears in front of me, hovering in the air. It’s a VR clip generated from my ocular tech. It’s Jun Bei talking to Brink, standing beside the terminal. She’s telling him that the civilians in the bunkers deserve a better leader than him—that they should have the right to make up their own minds.

  And he’s replying that they’re not civilians. He’s saying they belong to Cartaxus now.

  “Shit,” I breathe. “You did it. You actually did it.”

  “We did it,” she says, smiling, a lock of her dark hair slipping across her forehead. “You and I make excellent coding partners, Catarina. I wish I could hug you.”