This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  Night has fallen, and the cabin’s lights are out. The living room window has been shattered, but the glass is regrowing already in snowflake-like crystals that split the moonlight into rainbows. The room is a mess. Dead shards of glass are strewn across the floor, along with scattered gold feathers, muddy boot prints, and a pool of glistening blood.

  I stand on shaking legs above it, gripped with a fiercer anger than I have ever known.

  They shot him. I know it without checking. Cartaxus burst in here, and they shot my father and dragged him away.

  My genkit confirms that the blood belongs to my father, and I find no bullet casings even after scouring the room. My rudimentary panel can’t show me the VR feed from the security cameras, and they don’t convert easily into 2-D, but I finally manage to coax out a grainy, black-and-white feed on my little laptop genkit’s screen. It shows my father kneeling on the floor beside Dax, both their heads lowered, their hands raised as twelve soldiers storm into the room.

  Orders are shouted. Twelve semiautomatic rifles are aimed at two unarmed men—two scientists Cartaxus needs to build them a vaccine. My father turns his head and stands suddenly to reach for something on the wall, and when I see this on the video, I start to cry. I know what he’s reaching for. He wants the photograph of my mother, from when I was nothing more than a gentle curve beneath her dress. As my father stands, he barely manages to take a step before a soldier fires two bullets, the flashes saturating the feed.

  One bullet in the thigh, another in the bicep, avoiding the femoral artery, doing musculature damage that healing tech will fix in a week.

  In the grainy, stuttering video, my father slumps to the floor, and Dax screams. It’s silent, but I can hear him screaming. The soldiers drag him and my father out of the cabin, and the copters send a hurricane of feathers through the windows as they leave.

  The night burns into morning. I sit alone in the empty cabin as the viewscreen reports a steady stream of outbreaks around the world. I kneel on the floor with the photograph of my mother in my hands, beside a pool of my father’s blood, and make him a promise I intend to keep.

  No matter what happens, I will do what he told me. I will stay safe, and stay free.

  I will never let them take me.

  CHAPTER 3

  Present Day—Two Years after the Outbreak

  THE SUNSET IS A SINGLE hyphen of light on the horizon by the time I’m done with the infected man’s body. The glimmer of moonlight on the lake’s surface guides me to the shore, where I shove my filthy sleeves back and scrub the dirt and blood from my hands. The water is icy against my skin. Stray feathers dot the surface, fallen from the pigeons that are still overhead, silhouetted against the stars.

  I’ll sequence this flock’s DNA tomorrow, but I already know that all I’ll find are lines from the same poem, growing more garbled as the birds mutate. Each new generation brings more typos. Whole words collapse into nonsense. I’m starting to think that was the poet’s message all along.

  My hands shake in the water, jittery in the aftermath of the trigger response to the infected man’s scent. Its official name is intermittent acute psychotic anthropophagy, facilitated by the neurotransmitter epinephrine-gamma-2. Most people just call it the Wrath. The beast that claws into your mind, taking your humanity. It’s hard to remember the details of what happens when you yield to it. Everything blurs into a fog of teeth and flesh and instinct. Some people don’t realize they’ve succumbed to it until they stumble away and see the blood on their hands.

  you okay bobcat?

  Agnes’s text burns white in my vision. Blocky Courier script, the only font my measly graphics card has built in. The words swing across the lake’s surface as I tilt my head, moving with my vision until I blink them away. Fine, I reply, focusing on the word until my panel detects the thought. It ripples into my vision. I’ll be there soon . . . maybe an hour.

  want me to get you

  No. I splash my face. Going to drop into the market on the way. Got some slices to trade for ammo.

  Slices of flesh, that is. There’s an immunity market in town where the locals gather to trade doses for food and bullets. I dragged the body as far from the cabin as I could, cut fifty doses from it and shoved them in my last freezepak, then smacked them against a tree until they froze. That’s enough to keep a person immune for years. Half will go to the market, and the rest will sit in the cabin’s solar freezer as my own personal supply. I won’t let myself run out again, not after tonight. This might have been the closest call I’ve had since the outbreak.

  A herd of deer melts through the trees on the other side of the lake, coming down from the mountains for an evening drink. They approach the water cautiously, watching me with wide, reflective eyes, lifting their noses, confused by my scent. It wafts from my skin like a too-strong perfume. Sulfur and wood smoke—almost the same scent as the infected man, but missing a crucial note. My skin and hair, my clothes and breath, all stink of the plague, but I’m not infected.

  I’m immune.

  The fictonimbus virus, commonly known as Hydra, passes through two distinct stages before sending its victims into the sky. First, it injects triggers into a victim’s cells, throwing them into a fever, painting a mosaic of black-and-blue bruises across their skin. After a week they pass into the second stage, where it wraps every cell in their body with a layer of proteins, like the casing around a bomb. It’s that casing that gives off the scent that sparks the Wrath in anyone standing nearby, and it’s also the only thing that can stop the virus from entering your cells.

  That’s how the immunity works. If you eat the flesh of a second-stage victim, the virus doesn’t realize it’s changed hosts. Within an hour of taking a dose, it’ll wrap all your cells up, forming the only barrier strong enough to keep the virus from burrowing into them. You have to be careful, though. An early dose, taken from someone in the first stage, will infect you with the virus too. A late dose, taken from a second-stager on the brink of detonation, could blow a hole right through you before you digest it. The dose I took tonight was late stage, but didn’t have the warning signs—speckles of blood from burst capillaries that hint at imminent detonation.

  That’s lucky, because after the scent of infection hit me, I don’t know if I could have stopped myself.

  The deer lower their heads to drink, their ears twitching as I scrub my face and hands with the lake’s icy water. Every time I blink, I see the dead man’s face behind my eyes, a constant reminder of what I’ve just done to stay alive. To be honest, I can live with the killing, and I can even live with the eating, even though before the plague I would have sworn that I’d rather die.

  It’s funny, that saying—I’d rather die. It’s funny because nobody means it. The truth is that when you’re facing death, there’s no telling what you’ll do. When you’re killing people who are dying anyway, it almost makes it too easy.

  Almost.

  No, it’s not the killing that haunts me, or the immunity itching in my blood. It’s the fact that every time I do this, part of me likes it.

  Whenever the Wrath hits you, it comes on like an instinct, as powerful as survival and as basic as hunger. And when you yield to that instinct, it’s like nothing you’ve known. Endorphins. Fireworks. Your body’s entire arsenal of neurochemicals, all hurled into your brain as a staggering reward. Your body tries to convince you that murdering someone is the best thing you’ve ever done.

  It’s like a drug, and a dangerous one. The Wrath is so consuming that sometimes people lose themselves in it and never come back. We call them Lurkers. They travel in packs, hunting like wolves, locked in a constant state of hunger and bloodlust.

  I wipe my hands on my jeans, gather my things, and follow the gravel path up to the cabin. Night is falling fast, and I can barely see my way. My ocular tech makes a weak attempt to help me, multiplying the moonlight, turning my world into a pixelated mess. Before the outbreak, I begged my father to write me cosmetic apps like skinSmoo
th and luster, but he always said it was a waste of his time. These days I wish I’d asked him for ultraview or echolocation, or even the clunky kind of night vision that leaves scars around your eyes.

  I dump my bag on the cabin’s porch and wave my forearm over a sensor near the door, waiting for an LED to blink by the handle. You wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking. You also wouldn’t see the electromagnets bolted inside the frame, not until it was too late. When panels are first budded, they grow networks of cables inside you, like a subway system to transport nanites throughout your body. The cables use metal sockets in your shoulders and knees, so I wired up two electromagnets inside the door to wrench the knee sockets out of anyone who might try to break in.

  It’s not a perfect security system, but it’s better than nothing. Especially when all I have left is one bullet.

  The door clicks open, and the cabin’s lights blink on, casting a jaundiced glow across the living room. My sleeping bag is crumpled on a mattress near the fireplace, where a pile of last night’s embers smolders silently. The walls are bare, with the exception of a single photograph that Dax took of me and my father just before the outbreak. My father has his arm around my shoulders, and my hand is halfway to my face, pushing the windblown hair from my eyes.

  We look so alike. I have his gray eyes, his long, thin nose. Our chins are neat and tapered, like the bottom of a heart. In the photograph, my father’s mouth is curved in a rare smile—we’d just finished a piece of code we’d been working on for months. He never used words like “love,” but the day the photograph was taken, he told me he was proud of my work, which was close enough for me.

  I pick up my dirty clothes from the living room floor, shoving them into my rucksack to bring to Agnes’s. My long-suffering genkit is hidden under a pair of jeans—an old laptop model with a needle wire to jack into panels. Genkits are coding tools, used to access and edit gentech software and tweak or install apps and run maintenance. They’re not technically computers, but mine will act like one if you ask it nicely, and it’s been my trusty sidekick for the last two years.

  I flick it open, trying to decide whether to bring it with me. Ninety-five percent of the cracked screen blinks to life. A chat request pops up in the menu, and a woman’s face appears on the screen. Dr. Anya Novak. Scarlet hair, rhodium fingernails, and a trademark smile she blasts around the world three times a day. She’s the leader of the Skies, the loosely formed group of survivors that sprang up after Cartaxus used the outbreak to take over what was left of the world.

  They only took over to help us, of course. Cartaxus is always trying to help. They tried to help my father into a chopper by shooting him twice. They tried to help us after the outbreak by dissolving the world’s governments, seizing the media, and urging people into their massive underground bunkers.

  It seemed like a good idea at the time. If I hadn’t known better, I would have lined up with most of the locals for a place at the closest bunker, Homestake. Food, shelter, airlocks. Protection from the virus. Most people couldn’t think of a single reason not to go.

  But I could. My father’s words were fresh in my ears, and they still echo there two years later. Never let them take you. Sure enough, even though the bunkers were faradayed and guarded, rumors drifted out of deplorable conditions. People were living in dark, dirty cells. Cartaxus had taken control of their panels, wiping nonstandard apps and code. Security was brutal. Families were ripped apart.

  The choice was clear: risk your life on the surface, or swap your rights for an airlocked cell.

  Needless to say, not everyone made that trade. That’s when the Skies began.

  Novak waves at me from the genkit’s cracked screen. Most people make calls in VR, so I had to resurrect some old-school video code so I could talk to her. Her face pixelates for a moment into green and purple static, garbled by the weak satellite connection. The genkit gets a better signal in the cabin than my comm-link does, but the lag is still ridiculous.

  She smiles. “Good evening, Catarina.”

  I flinch. The Skies network is encrypted, but I still don’t like using my real name. As far as Cartaxus knows, I died in the outbreak, and I’d like to keep it that way.

  “Sorry, Bobcat,” she says. “I got the asthma code you forwarded. A little boy in Montana is breathing on his own again, thanks to you. I’ve got a segment ready to broadcast. I’d love to put you on air.”

  “No,” I say, waving my hands. “Absolutely not.”

  Novak pauses as my words bounce between satellites, reaching her a long, lagged moment after I speak. She sighs. We have this argument every time I steal a piece of code from Cartaxus’s servers and release it to the Skies. That’s another way Cartaxus is trying to help us—by withholding medical code and giving it only to the people in their bunkers. If you get hurt or sick, you can’t just download an app like you used to. You have to hand yourself in to a bunker, or suffer on your own.

  Or you can try Novak and her people. They maintain the last independent network, run on the old Russian satellites. They have libraries of code—open source, as free as the skies—but it’s glitchy and mostly written by amateurs. I write occasional apps and patches, but my biggest contributions come from the assaults I launch against Cartaxus’s servers. Basic smash-and-grab jobs. Busting into their databases, stealing any scraps of code I can find. Sometimes it’s antibiotics, sometimes it’s comm patches, and sometimes it’s a piece of code written by Dax or my father.

  Every time I find one of their files, it’s like a beam of light. Suddenly the years have been rolled back, and they’re downstairs in the lab again. There’s no virus, no Cartaxus soldiers. For a single, weightless moment there is only Dax’s stupid variable names and my father’s love of Fibonacci search. The lonely years spent learning, coding, and hacking are worth it just for that. Just to find scraps of their work and know they’re still alive.

  “I’m going to get you on air one of these days,” Novak says, arching a scarlet eyebrow. “But that’s not why I called. Something big’s going down at Cartaxus. We heard your name in the scuttlebutt.”

  “My name?”

  “Yes, your real name. Couldn’t make out many details, but your father was mentioned too. I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t like it. You might want to lay low for a while.”

  My chest tightens. “When was this?”

  “An hour ago. I just got the report now and called as soon as I could.”

  I glance at the window. That was around the time Agnes warned me about a jeep near the property. It can’t be a coincidence.

  “Everything okay there?” Novak asks. “Catarina, can you hear me?”

  Her voice rises, but I stay silent, the back of my neck prickling. My hand slides to the genkit’s mute key. Through the living room window I can see the last spots of light on the lake and a herd of scattering deer.

  They’re running from the water, wide-eyed and skittish, as the pigeons above them cry and swirl, twitching to crimson. Something’s spooked them. Something close. There’s nothing on my scans, but I feel it in my stomach.

  Someone’s here.

  “Gotta go,” I whisper, closing the genkit on Novak’s worried face. If I run, I might get into the woods before they reach the cabin. I stand, grabbing my rucksack, then bolt through the front door, across the porch, and down the stairs.

  My bike is on its side in the grass. I grab it and drag it with me, racing away from the cabin and into the cover of the trees. Still nothing on my scans. I run along the path, dodging branches, following a dirt trail through the forest.

  My ocular tech scrambles to adjust to the dim light, filtering the signals from my retina and pulsing them into my optic nerve. If I had better tech, I’d be able to see clearly in pitch blackness, but all my rudimentary panel can show me is a slightly brighter, pixelated view of the trees. It’s just enough to let me run, my knuckles white on the handlebars of my bike, weaving through the trees, skirting the edge of the lake.
I reach a thicket on the far side and pause, throwing a glance over my shoulder. For a second all I see is darkness, and then the cabin’s lines resolve, and I throw myself behind the closest tree.

  They’re here. A black jeep, just like Agnes said, is crunching down the driveway. My tech chirps, finally picking up the engine’s whine. The windows are obsidian black, the sides clearly armored. It looks like the love child of a Ferrari and a tank.

  The engine cuts out as the jeep pulls up beside the cabin, and the driver’s door swings open, throwing a slice of light across the porch. A single man steps out. His face is a blur of pixels until my tech locks in on him, drawing his features into focus.

  He’s young. Eighteen, maybe. Tall, with jacked-up muscles, dressed in a black tank top with the Cartaxus antlers stamped in white on his chest. His hair is dark and close-cropped, framing a stubble-dusted jaw and a nose that looks like it’s been broken a dozen times. Black leylines stretch up from his panel and frame the edges of his face, branching into the outer corners of his eyes and under his jaw. They’re matte and sleek, tattoolike, a conduit for code that’s too unpredictable to run beneath the skin.

  He steps toward the cabin, holding a semiautomatic, and turns his head slowly to scan the trees. My curiosity spikes. One soldier. That’s all they sent. He’s not a normal soldier, though; I’ve never seen one like this before. The troops from Homestake all look the same—armored jackets and fatigues, with HEPA-filtered masks and weapons wired right into their arms. They’re always fidgeting, jumpy with stimulants, snapping their heads around to let their visor’s AI scan their surroundings for them.

  But not this man.

  His clothing isn’t even bulletproof, and he stands eerily still as he scans the trees, his face expressionless. He has no backup, no drones, no shouted instructions. He’s just a kid, barely older than me, with a gun and a fancy car.

  What the hell is Cartaxus up to?