by Emily Suvada
Every time I’ve seen this comm-link message, it meant the user was dead.
But that’s not possible. My mind spins with alternatives: Maybe she turned off her panel; maybe she’s faradayed, and her signal is being blocked. There’s no way Agnes is dead. Downstairs, the front door swings open, its rusted hinges squealing. I scrunch my eyes shut.
Get yourself together, Bobcat.
The voice rears up, sharp as a whip. It’s not Agnes, but I know that’s what she’d say. The old girl would probably yell at me for sitting here like this. Quit your moping, she’d say, and get back on your damn feet.
Footsteps thud across the living room below me. I push myself up from the bed, swallowing hard against the pain. I don’t know why the soldier brought me back here, but I know it can’t be good. I clutch my stomach, scanning the room for something I can use to get away.
One of my father’s silver fountain pens gleams on the mahogany bedside table atop a stack of dusty, handwritten notes. I pick it up, turn it in my hand. The ink-stained nib is flimsy, but it’s sharp and metal, and it’s better than nothing. I grip it in one fist and run to the far wall, where my rucksack has been dumped on the floor. I slump to my knees and rifle through it, finding the dirty clothes I was bringing to Agnes’s, a water filter, bandages . . .
And thirty-five ounces of frozen infected flesh.
My breath rushes from me. The freezepak is soft, completely thawed. I pull it from the rucksack and flip it over, checking the meat. It shudders in my hands, letting out a pop as a bubble of gas forms at one end. The sound that woke me from my sleep. The meat is starting to detonate, cell by cell, and it could blow at any minute. When it does, it could take out half the room.
My eyes slide to the boarded-up window, a rough plan forming in my mind. It’s dangerous, and crazy as hell, but it just might get me out of here.
Footsteps creak up the stairs. I hold the fountain pen in my teeth and lurch to the window, squeezing the freezepak between the boards. It catches on the splinters, but I manage to shove it through and spin around, hiding the pen behind me just as the door swings open.
The soldier stands in the doorway, looking me up and down with ice-blue eyes that I could swear were black when he attacked me. He steps forward slowly, his eyes darting to the corners of the room, and the hair on the back of my neck bristles.
This isn’t just a soldier. He is a weapon.
That fact is written in the leylines stamped around his face, in the fierce alertness of his sparkling blue eyes. He’s unarmed, but every movement seems threatening. Every footstep is a steel spring coiling, the flash of a razor’s edge. There’s an air about him that speaks to a lifetime of military training, of shouting and drills and cleaning weapons. His hands are empty, slightly open, and I have a flash of them closing on my neck.
“Good evening, Catarina.” He reaches out one hand. “I’m Lieutenant Cole Franklin.”
“Don’t touch me,” I say, backing away. “Don’t come any closer.”
He looks puzzled by my fear. Of course he is. He probably doesn’t know what it is to be afraid, to be as hopelessly outmatched as this. A rabbit cornered by a wolf. The fountain pen in my fist suddenly feels like a child’s toy. I could stab him in the side, and he’d probably just pull it out and laugh.
“I’m not going to hurt you.” His voice is low and calm.
“What did you do to Agnes?”
“What do you mean?” He steps closer, and I back into the bookshelf. Nowhere to go, no way to fight. Not until the slice blows, which could be any second. Or it could be far too late.
“My friend,” I say. “You shot her.”
“No I didn’t.” He steps closer. “I shot the gun out of her hands, but I didn’t hurt her.”
“Liar.”
His eyebrows rise. “If I killed her, then who do you think braided your hair and changed your clothes? It certainly wasn’t me.”
I raise one hand to the back of my head, where my waist-length dark hair has been washed, brushed, and knotted into a fishtail braid. My skin is clean, and I’m dressed in a black cotton T-shirt and shorts with the Cartaxus logo printed across them.
I didn’t even notice.
I open my mouth but don’t know what to say. Last summer Agnes taught me how to do a fishtail braid when I said I was sick of my hair and planning to shave it off. She’s braided it like this a dozen times, nimble fingers drawing my unruly dark hair into clean, glossy knots. My skin and hair are scented lightly with her lavender soap, the kind I helped her make a batch of last month in her basement.
The soldier isn’t lying. Agnes must have survived. So why the hell isn’t she responding to my comm?
“Wh-what happened after I passed out?”
The soldier smiles. He’s handsome when he smiles, but it doesn’t make me less afraid of him.
“We put you in an ice bath in her basement,” he says. “We had to lower your temperature for twenty-four hours to let the healing tech work. She washed you and changed you into those clothes. She cooked me soup, and we decided you’d feel better waking up somewhere familiar, so I brought you here.”
“Then why won’t she answer her comm?”
“I have no idea. She was packing when I left. It looked like she was leaving.”
I grit my teeth. That must be a lie. Agnes would never leave without telling me. She’d leave me a note, a comm, a message. She wouldn’t abandon me.
Pop.
I let my eyes dart to the window, where the freezepak lies hidden. There are still no signs of heat, no jets of gas. I need to stall the soldier longer. His head is turned to the window, his brow furrowed.
“Who are you?” I blurt out, trying to distract him. “Why are you here?”
He narrows his eyes, staring at the window a moment longer, before turning his gaze to me. “My name is Lieutenant Cole Franklin. I’m here because a week ago your father’s laboratory and research files were hacked by the terrorist organization known as the Skies.”
I almost laugh. Terrorist organization. We’re not the ones with the drones and soldiers, with screaming jets and long-range missiles. We don’t bury landmines around our bases or shoot people who come begging for food. Hacking Cartaxus’s servers is the most aggressive thing we do, and we’re not even particularly good at that.
“I don’t know anything about that,” I say.
“Your father was in the laboratory—”
“He hasn’t talked to me in years. I told you—I don’t know anything.”
“Miss Agatta, your father is dead.”
I freeze. The words hang in the air. My heart gives a single panicked thump before I grab hold of myself.
“You must think I’m an idiot if you expect me to believe that.”
The soldier tilts his head. “Whether you believe it or not, I’m telling you the truth. The terrorists infected our servers with a virus that caused the genkits in your father’s lab to self-destruct. Your father was caught in the explosion along with most of his staff. I’m very sorry for your loss, Miss Agatta.”
I swallow, scanning the soldier’s face, searching for a sign that he’s lying. There’s nothing—no nervousness, no flickers of guilt. But that doesn’t mean anything. He’s a trained Cartaxus soldier, so lying must be second nature to him. I straighten, squaring my shoulders. “You said the Skies did this?”
He nods. “The attack used a sophisticated computer virus that infected most of our systems. Some of them have been permanently corrupted.”
I let out a long, slow breath. He’s definitely lying. I’ve launched hundreds of hacks with the Skies, and our attempts were anything but sophisticated. They were smash-and-grab jobs. Kick down the doors and steal everything shiny. We never came close to destroying genkits or corrupting files.
“So you’re a messenger?” I ask. “That’s very kind of Cartaxus, to send someone out to deliver the news in person.”
“That’s not why I’m here.”
Of course i
t’s not. Novak told me something big was going down at Cartaxus—something involving me. Maybe my father tried to escape, maybe he refused to follow their orders, and they’ve sent someone out here to see if they can find some leverage.
But I won’t give it to them. My grip tightens on the fountain pen. It won’t do much harm, but it might buy me some time if I jam it in the soldier’s face. I shift my weight, preparing to swing my arm around, but before I can move, the soldier’s hands fly out.
The room spins. There is pressure on my arms, a sudden blur of light. In the time it takes me to register what’s happening, I have been picked up and spun around, and the fountain pen is gone.
“What the . . . ,” I gasp, grabbing the bookshelf to steady myself. I’ve never seen anyone move that fast. I didn’t even know it was possible. I blink, shaking my head, waiting for my vision to stop spinning.
The soldier throws the pen across the room. “I wouldn’t try that again if I were you. I don’t want to hurt you, Miss Agatta, but if you don’t cooperate, I’ll be forced to improvise.”
I don’t want to hurt you. Another lie. That’s all Cartaxus does. They lie and crush anyone who tries to resist them. Anger bleeds through me. I step closer, glaring at the soldier. “You can threaten me all you like, but you’re a fool if you think I’m going without a fight.”
The soldier’s brow creases. He opens his mouth just as a hiss starts up beside me, followed by a rapid series of pops.
The sound of human cells beginning to blow inside the slice of flesh hidden in the window.
There’s my escape, right on time. The soldier turns to the boarded-up window. We’re close enough that I can see the spark of panic in his eyes and smell the air wafting from his skin. He smells only of soap and sweat and laundry detergent, without a single hint of sulfur.
My captor is not immune.
I’d smell it if he was. That sharp, sour scent that clings to your skin as long as you’re protected from the virus. The soldier is going to get infected unless he turns and runs. Judging by the sound of the slice, he needs to run fast.
“You’d better go,” I say.
His eyes blink wide. “Catarina, what are you doing?”
I raise an eyebrow. “Improvising.”
The window starts to rattle. The freezepak is swelling now, the meat shuddering and frothing as it prepares to blow. I lurch away, hoping to take cover behind the bed, but the soldier’s weight crashes into me, and the slice blows with the force of a thunderclap.
CHAPTER 6
THE BEDROOM’S OUTER WALL EXPLODES, blasting into splinters and shards of glass that slash my skin as they hurtle through the air. The bookshelves fly across the room, sending out a flurry of paper, and a jet of mist slams against the plaster ceiling. The air is hot and choking, stinking of blood and plague. I cough, scrunching my eyes shut, my hands bunched in the soldier’s shirt. We land hard on the mattress, with his body above me, curled around me.
Protecting me from the blast.
I scramble back, coughing. The soldier falls to his knees, doubled over, the skin on his shoulders sliced to ribbons. His eyes are midnight black, but they quickly change to blue, an ocular upgrade that I’ve never seen before. I stare at his eyes for a full, stunned beat before I realize he’s staring back at me.
“Are you okay, Catarina?”
I blink. I should be jumping through the hole in the wall and bolting through the woods, but I can’t move. Everything about this is wrong. He’s not supposed to ask if I’m okay, not after I just murdered him. Not after I infected him with a Hydra cloud.
“Your leg,” he says, reaching for my ankle, where I took the blast straight on. Fat droplets of blood are welling on my skin, mixing with the pink, foamy sheen of the cloud. Jagged splinters jut from my ankle, and scratches arc across my calf, but it’s nothing compared to the shredded skin on the soldier’s arms.
“You got hit,” he says. “I need to clean this.”
“Soldier, you . . . You’re not immune.” I wait for his eyes to widen, for the realization to set in, but he only seems interested in the wounds on my leg.
“You can call me Cole.” He tilts his body to look down the length of my leg, his eyes pausing on a few deep scratches. His own skin is bloody and raw, with splinters and glass embedded in his shoulders, but he doesn’t seem to notice, or maybe his implants have dulled the pain. He pulls a yellow plastic packet from his pants and tears it open with his teeth. The scent of disinfectant cuts through the haze as he swipes my ankle with a stinging towelette.
“Don’t touch me,” I whisper, scrambling back on the bed. A trickle of foam runs down my cheek. I wipe it with the back of my hand. “You’re infected. Are you even listening to me?”
“Please, I’m not going to hurt you. I’ve been programmed to protect you.”
That makes me pause. You can’t program someone’s mind, not even with gentech, but that’s not what’s bothering me about what Cole just said. “Why would you be programmed to protect me?”
“Because your life is important. Please, Catarina. I need to clean this wound.”
At this point I’m too confused to resist. I let him clean my ankle and barely wince at the sting of the disinfectant. Cole seems utterly calm despite the scarlet mist swirling in the air, the countless Hydra particles sweeping into his lungs. He’s completely unconcerned, but I know he’s not immune. I would have smelled it on his skin, I would have . . .
“Oh shit,” I breathe. “You’re not infected, are you?”
He shakes his head, his eyes meeting mine through the wafting clouds of mist. It clicks inside me like the tumblers in a lock.
“There’s a vaccine.”
“Yes, Catarina,” he says. “There’s a Hydra vaccine.”
The words are like a jolt. I stand up, pushing the foam-slicked hair back from my face. My hands are shaking with the thought that this could all be over. No more blood on my hands. No more nights spent alone. With a vaccine, people could leave the bunkers. We could finally start to rebuild. The nightmare of the last two years could fade to a distant memory.
I could have a life again; the world could go back to normal. . . .
But that still doesn’t explain why there’s a Cartaxus soldier sitting in my father’s bedroom.
“I haven’t heard anything about a vaccine.” I gesture to the ruined wall. “You could have planted that meat, or it could have been faked somehow. This could all be a setup.”
Cole sighs, folding the bloodied towelette into a square on his knee. “Now why would I want to do that?”
I don’t have an answer to that, just a growing sense of unease. I cross my arms over my chest, limping to the toppled bookshelves. The floor is slick with greasy foam, littered with splinters, glass, and paper. If Cole is telling the truth about the vaccine, does that mean he’s telling the truth about my father?
“If there’s a vaccine,” I ask, “then why hasn’t Cartaxus released it?”
“Because they don’t have it anymore.”
I spin around. “Then who does?”
“Nobody. The hack that destroyed your father’s lab corrupted most of his work. I’m one of a handful of trial subjects who received the code in a test a few days before the attack. We have fragments backed up, but the attack was complex. Most of your father’s work is unrecoverable.”
I just stare at him. “That’s ridiculous. The Skies are amateurs—they couldn’t pull off a hack like that. And besides, how could the code be lost? Didn’t you just say you had it in your arm?”
Cole’s face darkens, and he turns his forearm so his panel shines up at me. It’s a bar of solid blue, even bigger than Dax’s. The silicone that forms his panel’s body is a grid with spaces for thousands of separate function cores—individual processors that run each of his apps. The bigger the panel, the more function cores, the more cobalt dots on his skin representing the apps running inside him, altering his body. But I’ve never seen a panel as big as Cole’s before. Wh
at the hell does he have in that thing?
“The vaccine works as a special implant,” he says. “Once it’s installed, it becomes locked to each user’s DNA, so even if I ejected the function core out of my arm and put it into yours, it wouldn’t work. The only way to share it is to get the original code, but that’s heavily encrypted.”
I nod. A lot of the code I stole from Cartaxus to release on the Skies network was encrypted like that. We had to crack it before we could release it, something I’ve never been good at. I have natural talents for hacking networks and stealing files, but cracking and decrypting takes a whole different set of skills. The Skies have a team dedicated to it. Most of Cartaxus’s code is easy to unlock, but some files are so well encrypted that we’ve never come close to cracking them.
“But Cartaxus would have the key,” I say, speaking to Cole like I would a child. “Or they’d be able to guess it. They have standard encryptions. They have backup procedures for data breaches.”
Cole frowns. “You know a lot about this.”
“Not really.” I drop my eyes. “I just picked up a few things from my father.”
This is dangerous ground. It’s a miracle Cole hasn’t already put it together that I’m one of the Skies hackers he’s talking about. My genkit is downstairs, and it would only take a moment for someone who knows what they’re doing to open it up and log in to Novak’s network.
From what I’ve been able to determine from my time hacking their servers, Cartaxus would very much like to see the hacker known as Bobcat disappear from the face of the planet.
Cole watches me carefully. “Our scientists are working on unlocking the code, but they estimate that it’ll take six months to crack it with brute force.”
“Six months?” My head spins. That’s an eternity. “What insane kind of encryption algorithm did they use on it?”
“I don’t know, except that it was encrypted by your father.”
I look up sharply. That doesn’t make sense. My father hates gentech encryption—he always said that medical code should be released to anyone who needs it. He’d never lock up the vaccine—he’d shout it from the rooftops. He’d give it away for free.