This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

I lean forward, squinting, when a crack echoes through the forest like a gunshot. The soldier spins around, searching for the origin of the sound. I flinch instinctively, drawing back behind the tree. My vision zooms in and out, and my hand comes down on a dry branch as I try to steady myself.

  It snaps beneath my fingers.

  Such a little sound that might as well be a firecracker for the way it slices through the air, echoing off the mountains. I shoot a glance back at the soldier and find him staring right at me. His hands tighten on his weapon.

  I grab my bike and run.

  Through the trees, back along the creek that feeds the lake, bolting for the fire trail that cuts between the mountains. Leaves and branches whip my skin. More shots ring out behind me, echoing from the slopes until the night air sings with violence. I hit the fire trail, throw my leg over my bike and pedal blindly down the pitch-black, rock-studded slope.

  My ocular tech kicks into overdrive, burning calories I can’t afford to lose. Hints of light become lines of fire that guide my way. My audio filters amplify the footsteps in the distance into thunder, punctuated by the crack of gunshots. The soldier must be chasing me, shooting in the dark. Each gunshot rattles my breathing, its acoustic fingerprint multiplied in my ears. . . .

  Only those aren’t gunshots.

  It hits me like a punch. I skid to a stop, scrambling off my bike, wrenching my sweater over my head. That wasn’t a shot that startled the soldier; it was a piece of the infected man’s body. The man I killed for immunity. The man I took a dose from. His body is detonating, but I could have sworn I checked his flesh for warning markers. I thought he had at least a day, but I must have missed the signs. Now he’s blowing, every single cell bursting into scalding gas, including the blood soaked into my clothes.

  Patches hiss on my jeans, erupting into tiny plumes. A hundred points of fire, a hundred lit cigarettes. I fall to my knees, tearing at the fabric, crying out as they sizzle across my skin.

  My healing tech kicks in, sucking the energy from my panel, and my ocular tech sputters out, plunging me into darkness. Footsteps pound somewhere nearby, crashing through the trees, but I can’t track them on my own, and I can’t see well enough to run.

  I’m trapped.

  He’s coming. He’ll be here any minute, and there’s nowhere I can run to, nowhere to hide.

  “Agnes,” I gasp, scrambling for a comm-link, hearing only static. “He’s coming. Yaya, can you hear me?”

  If Agnes can hear, she doesn’t reply. The footsteps pound closer, somewhere along the fire trail. I crawl forward in my tattered clothing, grasping blindly for my bike even though there’s no way I’ll be able to ride like this. Another crack echoes from the hills, and the breath rushes from my lungs as something lurches inside me.

  I scream, clutching my stomach, and tumble into the dirt. A ribbon of fire coils up into my throat.

  The dose I ate, it’s not digested yet. And what’s left of it just blew inside me.

  CHAPTER 4

  I LAND HARD ON MY side, curling into a ball, biting my fist to stop myself from crying out. My stomach is aflame, the pain streaking up my back, arcing along the curve of my ribs and swallowing me whole. The footsteps grow closer, pounding up the fire trail until they’re right on top of me, but I can’t get up or run away. All I can do is scrunch my eyes shut, hoping that if the soldier wants to kill me, he’ll have the decency to make it quick.

  “Bobcat, is that you?”

  Strong hands roll me to my back. I blink, expecting the soldier, but instead see a woman’s face framed by a halo of gray hair. Agnes gapes down at me, her eyes wide and frantic. “Oh, Bobcat. Oh, my poor girl.”

  “Yaya,” I choke out, shaking with relief. “You found me. How did you get here so fast?”

  She wipes the dirt from my face. “Novak called me, said she was worried.”

  “Th-the soldier,” I say, coughing. It feels like there’s a knife in my stomach. Every breath, every movement just drives it deeper. “Cartaxus is here.”

  “I know.” She drops her voice, glancing over her shoulder. “We’re gonna get out of here, but you have to get up. I can’t carry you.”

  I force myself to take her hands, summoning the strength to rise to my feet. Somehow we stagger down the hill to where her car is waiting. There’s a door, then light, then I’m lying in the back, curled on my side. Agnes’s breath comes short and fast as she races around to the front and throws herself into the driver’s seat. Her skin is flushed and damp, wisps of gray hair plastered to her cheeks.

  She wrenches the car’s joystick. The engine spins up with a high-pitched whine, and we lurch along the fire trail. “What happened to you?” she asks.

  I cough again, the movement sending pain stabbing through me. “The dose was too late. Thought I checked it, but it was dark. . . .”

  “Ohh,” she cries out, leaning around to look me up and down, letting the autodriver follow the trail on its own. She reaches out to yank up what’s left of my sweater. The fabric is in tatters after the spots of blood on it detonated. Her eyes rise to mine slowly, her voice falling to a whisper. “You immune?”

  I nod. She lets out a sigh of relief.

  “I took the dose an hour ago.” That’s not long enough to fully digest it, but it’s enough time for the immunity to spread through my cells. I won’t get infected, but that doesn’t mean I’m coming out of this alive.

  “You must be hurting, Bobcat,” she says. “Heard it’s been happening a lot lately. I swear they’re blowing faster than they used to. The damn plague keeps getting smarter. But don’t worry, this ain’t hard to treat. The doc will have you better in no time.”

  “No he won’t.” I scrunch my eyes shut, clutching my stomach. “Hypergenesis, remember?”

  Gentech has been around for thirty years, and people have already forgotten how medicine used to work without it. The local doctor can set a broken bone or dig a bullet out, but he cures most of his patients by optimizing apps for their DNA. Standard healing tech does the rest. Agnes could come back from almost any injury without so much as a scar, but my tech can’t handle major trauma. It can’t stop heavy internal bleeding, or hypovolemic shock. It’ll heal me, but it’ll do it so slowly I might die before it’s finished.

  “So what do you want me to do?” Agnes’s brow furrows. The autodriver swings us onto the dirt road that circles the edge of the property.

  “We need to get somewhere safe.” I cough into my hand. The pain is like a living, clawing beast inside me. “You need to lower my body temperature, give my tech more time to work. And I need calories. I’m running on empty right now.”

  She turns back to the front. “Okay, I can do that. I’ll call Novak. She’ll know what to do. You’re gonna be just fine, Bobcat.”

  I cough again, clutching my stomach. I wish I had her optimism. The only time I’ve been hurt this badly before, I had my father there to save me. To jack into my panel and run a live stream of hypergenesis-friendly nanites, writing the kind of code that made Cartaxus so desperate to take him.

  Now I’m on my own, with tech in my arm that took a week to heal a broken finger. I’d have a better chance if I had my genkit, but I left it back at the cabin, along with all my files, and my code. The photograph of me and my father. Now that Cartaxus knows I’m here, I might never be able to go home again.

  Branches smack against the windows as we veer onto an overgrown road, heading for the highway that leads into what’s left of town. Agnes tilts the rearview until her eyes meet mine. “Why did you let your immunity lapse?”

  I snort. “Because I’m an idiot.”

  She grabs the joystick to swing us around a bend. “You’re not an idiot. You’re a genius, if I recall.”

  “Well, I’m feeling pretty stupid right now.”

  She presses her lips together. “You’ll come back from this, Bobcat. Remember the shape you were in when I found you?”

  “Yeah,” I mutter. “But I don’t think soup is going
to save me this time, Yaya.”

  Agnes and I met when she showed up at the cabin a few months after the outbreak. The temperature was diving with the start of a bitter winter, and I wasn’t prepared, not by a long shot. My food supplies were gone, and the solars on the cabin’s roof kept getting blocked by snow, killing my only source of power. I was spending my days huddled in blankets, shivering and hungry, not knowing if my father and Dax were even still alive. When Agnes arrived, searching for supplies, she found me feverish and shaking, passed out beside the fireplace.

  I woke two days later, scrubbed clean, with a stomach full of soup she’d fed me when I was too delirious to remember. She nursed me back to health and said that she’d seen the footage on my genkit of Cartaxus storming the cabin. She had no love for Cartaxus either and had just joined a group determined to stop them from taking over the world.

  She asked me if I’d thought about working for the Skies.

  That day was a turning point for me. It’s almost as though I died beside the fireplace and woke the next day as someone else. One of those moments that split your life in two, letting the weakest parts of yourself fall away so you can emerge as something stronger. I promised that day that I would live to see my father again.

  But tonight, I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep that promise.

  We speed up as we hit the highway. The acceleration throws me back into the seat, and I cough wetly. Something dribbles from my lips. When I touch it, my fingers come away dark. Agnes turns back to me, her face paling.

  “You’re bleeding. Bobcat, it’s worse than I thought. We need to . . .”

  She trails off as headlights splash through the rear window. I pull myself up, gritting my teeth against the pain to look behind us. The hulking black jeep is hurtling through the forest. It skids onto the road, sending a spray of rocks and dust flying out from its tires.

  “He followed me,” I whisper. “You shouldn’t have come, Yaya. Now you’re in danger too.”

  “Nonsense,” Agnes snaps. “Is it just the one soldier?”

  I nod, swallowing. My mouth tastes like acid and rust.

  “Then we’ll scare him off. He’ll stop and call for backup. They always do. My gun’s on the floor back there, but it’s not loaded. Ammo should be in a box somewhere.”

  I tear my eyes away from the jeep and grope around the floor, fighting back a surge of pain from the movement. My fingers close on the wooden butt of Agnes’s rifle, and I haul it up and into my lap. Still need ammo. I grit my teeth, searching for the box.

  A shot rings through the air. Agnes swerves, startled.

  “They’ve never shot at me before,” she says, her face lit up by the jeep’s headlights.

  Another shot rings out. This time it takes off Agnes’s side mirror, forcing the autodriver into an emergency stop.

  “No, you idiot, come on,” she growls, struggling with the car’s controls.

  We finally surge forward again, but now the jeep is right behind us. I throw a desperate glance through the rear window. No time to find the ammo. My hand rises to the insurance bullet on the chain around my neck.

  I yank it off, loading it with shaking hands. The rifle lifts easily, swinging to my shoulder in a well-practiced arc. I take aim through the rear window, squinting in the headlights, and the jeep screeches to a stop, swinging around.

  Its window opens suddenly, showing me a glimpse of the soldier’s face. There’s a weapon on his shoulder aimed directly at me. The world lurches into slow motion. Agnes’s rear window shatters, and something flies into the car. A small cylinder, painted military green. It bounces through the back and lands on the passenger seat. A series of high-pitched beeps cut the air, then a burst of light and pressure blows out the car’s windows.

  I fly back into my seat. Agnes screams, jerking at the car’s controls as we spin wildly into the trees. I throw my arms over my face instinctively, and the next thing I know, I’m lying on the ground.

  Dirt. Grass. Blood in my mouth. My stomach is a tight mass of pain. Thick, acrid smoke chokes the air, spilling from the wreckage of Agnes’s car.

  “Agnes!” I shout, squinting through the smoke. The blurriness at the edges of my vision is growing, shrinking my world down to a speck. “Where are you?”

  “Here, Bobcat,” she croaks, limping from the car. Her hair is wild, her pants bloodied. She has the rifle in one hand. She staggers over to me. “Stay down. I’ll draw him away.”

  “No,” I choke out, coughing. “He’s after me! Get out of here.”

  She gives me a crinkled smile, blood dripping from a gash on her forehead. “After all this time, you think I would leave you?”

  “Please, Yaya, you have to get away.”

  “Ain’t no point in living alone,” she says, peering back through the smoke. “The only damn thing that makes life worthwhile is people looking after each other.”

  “No,” I beg. I don’t want to hear these words. This is the kind of thing people say to each other before they die.

  The jeep stops in the middle of the road, its doors flying open. The soldier rushes out so fast he’s barely more than a blur.

  Agnes lifts the rifle. “I love you, Catarina.”

  “No!” I scream as two shots echo from the hills.

  Time stutters and slows. My vision wavers. The soldier stumbles back, and Agnes disappears into the grass.

  But that’s not right.

  I saw it wrong. It’s a trick of the light. She can’t be down. Agnes is the toughest woman alive.

  “Agnes!” I cry out, not caring if the soldier hears me. I try to push myself up, dragging myself through the grass, but a hand grabs my shoulder, flipping me over. I blink and find myself staring into twin pools of perfect blackness.

  It takes me a horrified second to realize that they’re the soldier’s eyes.

  “Catarina Agatta?” he shouts, shaking me.

  “Help!” I scream, fighting his grip. His hands are like steel. I claw for his eyes, and he grabs me around the neck. I try to scream again, but my voice is nothing more than a whimper.

  The smoke and wreckage fade into a speck that sputters and disappears.

  CHAPTER 5

  POP . . . POP.

  I wake with a pounding headache to a sound that feels like nails being driven into my skull. Beyond the throbbing in my temples, there’s a fuzziness to my thoughts that tells me I’m getting another migraine. They come every few months, pounding at the base of my skull, tracing glowing silver scotomas across my vision. I ran out of pills last year, so now they leave me crippled for days. Another thing my panel doesn’t do: synthesize painkillers.

  Pop.

  Wincing through the pain, I take a slow breath and open my eyes, searching for the source of the sound. Wooden beams ripple into view on the ceiling above me. Real wood, not the cultured stuff where the knots and carefully engineered imperfections repeat at regular intervals. This wood is old and ragged, coated in thick spiderwebs that stretch down to moldy boards nailed over a window. It suddenly occurs to me that I don’t know how I got here.

  Perhaps more concerning: I don’t know where I am.

  Bladelike shafts of light slant obliquely through the boards nailed over the window, so it’s either late afternoon or early morning. I’m lying on a wrought-iron bed in a small room with a heavy woolen blanket draped over me, facing a row of dusty bookshelves. A portrait hangs on the far wall, a framed sketch of a little girl with long dark hair. Her pursed mouth is captured with sparse, confident strokes, her eyes lifted, as though she has been asked a difficult question and is contemplating her response.

  Her image is frustratingly familiar. A name on the tip of my tongue, held aloft and out of reach by the pain at the base of my skull. I dig my fingernails into my palms. An old trick my father taught me. Wrestle the pain into a spike, force it under your control. The fog in my mind clears, and I sit bolt upright on the bed.

  The little girl in the sketch is me. My father drew it when I wa
s a child. I’m on his bed, staring at his books, sitting in his room in the cabin. I twist to look around, gripped by the sudden, insane hope that he’s home, that he’s here, but the movement sends a stab of pain through me, and it all comes hurtling back.

  The plumes, the jeep. The dose blowing in my stomach. The soldier shaking me, shouting my name before I passed out. Was he the one who brought me here? My breath catches at the thought, and I stare wildly around the room, sending my tech into overdrive.

  My audio tech spins up, but I can’t hear the popping sound that woke me from my sleep. I can hear my own breathing, my heart pounding inside me, and a sudden blare of scrambled noise rushing in from the forest. It grows louder as my tech isolates and amplifies each source. The rustle of the pine trees. The cries of a distant flock of pigeons. A steady thump, somewhere below me.

  The footsteps of a man on the front porch, pacing back and forth in heavy boots.

  My heart slams against my ribs. It has to be the soldier. The memory of his black eyes sends a chill through me. I need to find a way to get out of here, to call Agnes . . .

  Shit. I completely forgot about Agnes.

  I invoke my comm-link, closing my eyes. I don’t have enough reception in the cabin to make a call, but I can usually send a text.

  Agnes. Where. Are you. Soldier . . . took me.

  The pixelated words appear in my vision slower than usual. My mind is racing, making it hard for my panel to detect the shape of my thoughts. I focus on Agnes, on the command to send. The text disappears, but her username shows her as offline.

  Agnes, I send again, struggling to form the words. Agnes. You okay? Please respond.

  A network icon spins in my vision next to Agnes’s username, pinging her to connect, but she’s still offline. She’s always responded in seconds before. The icon stops spinning, and Agnes’s username appears above a line of gray text.

  This user either does not exist or is out of range.

  A gasp escapes my lips before I can clamp my hands over my mouth, and the footsteps on the front porch stop. The soldier. He heard me. I hold my breath, frozen.