This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  I spin the screen around. “I don’t know if she’s alive right now, but it looks like she pinged a server in Australia three days ago.”

  Cole turns to stone. I spin the genkit back around, trying to get a better lock on her location. A week ago she hit a server in Zimbabwe. But that can’t be right. Even Cartaxus officials don’t fly around the world like that these days.

  I race through another scan, finding results faster now that I know the masking method she’s been using. Her technique unfurls in the results, and it’s brilliant. She’s bouncing her location all around the world continually. Moscow, Beijing, Antarctica. Outposts in the Sahara. Wherever this girl is, she doesn’t want to be found.

  “Wait, not Australia,” I say, hunting through the data. “I think she might be in the US, but that’s the best I can do, sorry.”

  I look up. Cole’s jaw is clenched, and his eyes are squeezed shut. His shoulders are twitching. . . .

  Oh shit. He’s crying.

  I look away. This feels wrong. He shouldn’t be handcuffed to the counter, not like this. He’s just found out the girl he loves is still alive. “I, uh . . . let me find the key to the handcuffs.” I pat around on the floor, avoiding looking at him. “I’m sorry, I don’t know where I dropped—”

  He pushes himself up from the floor, rubbing his wrists. The handcuffs lie split on the concrete, the glinting steel twisted and bent. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’ll help you,” he says, holding his hand out. “I’m in, Catarina, for whatever it takes to unlock the vaccine.”

  “Oh,” I breathe, nerves kicking inside me. I take his hand cautiously and let him help me up. “Are you sure?”

  He nods. “She’s alive.” His eyes are blazing. The candle of hope I saw in him before has leaped into a roaring fire. “She’s alive, and she’s out there somewhere, which means you’re right. She’s vulnerable until we release the vaccine. Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it. We won’t go to Cartaxus. I’ll hide you from them. I’ll take you wherever you need to go. I can’t risk losing her again.”

  “Okay,” I whisper, the hair on the back of my neck rising. A low, thrumming power is rolling off Cole. The cluttered laboratory seems to shrink around him. It’s like looking at the sun. Like he could tear the world apart with his hands if he wanted to.

  He is a weapon of considerable power. That’s what my father said. For the first time, I think I know what he meant by that.

  “We’ll leave tomorrow,” Cole says, scanning the room. “We’ll take all of Lachlan’s notes and go through them on the way. We’ll find a clonebox—we can steal one if we have to. There’s no time to waste. We can make it to that lab in a day if the roads are clear.”

  “Sure,” I say, still staring at him. He’s not even listening to me. I can see the plans for the journey to the lab forming in his mind.

  Twenty minutes ago he was ready to slap a pair of handcuffs on me and drag me back to a Cartaxus cell. Now he’s pledging his allegiance, promising to do anything to help me, all because a girl he loved years ago is still alive. The change is so abrupt and deep, it’s left me spinning, and at the core of my confusion is a single, burning thought: My father knew all of this would happen.

  He knew Cole would come to me, that I would find these clues, and that I would find Jun Bei to convince him to help me. The pieces of my father’s jigsaw puzzle have interlocked and now stand before me, a Cartaxus weapon allied to my cause.

  It’s terrifying.

  This is blackmail. I’m using Cole’s feelings to force him to help me, and I know that my father planned this; he played Cole with perfect pitch. I should be proud I heard enough of the melody to carry the song alone, but for some reason it’s left me feeling shaken.

  My father was distant sometimes, even cold. He could lose himself in his work for weeks and forget to speak to me. He was blunt, he was eccentric, and he was sometimes hard to live with, but my love for him never wavered because deep down I believed that he was good.

  He spent his life writing vaccines. Crafting medical code. His mind was a razor, but he only wielded it to fight suffering and disease. Never like this—as a weapon. As a way to control people. Standing here, watching Cole pace across the lab, I suddenly feel like I’m in a stranger’s house.

  Cole turns to me. “You know, you look a lot like your father when you do that.”

  My heart twists. “When I do what?”

  “When you look at someone like they’re a problem you’re trying to solve.”

  “My father looked at you like that?”

  “He looked at everyone like that, Catarina.” He blinks, still distracted. “Come on, let’s go upstairs. We need to pack and plan out a route to the lab, and you need to get a good night’s sleep before we hit the road. Are you ready to do this?”

  I wrap my arms around myself, nodding. “Of course.”

  Cole turns and heads up the concrete stairs to the living room. I follow dumbly. We finally have a chance to end the nightmare of this plague. I should be thrilled, I should want to celebrate, but all I feel is a growing sense of unease.

  I’m beginning to realize that the father I remember isn’t the one Cole seems to know.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE NEXT MORNING I WAKE to the familiar sounds of the forest, with the last remnants of sleep still heavy in my bones. For a few precious moments I float in a state of half alertness, snuggling deeper into the warmth of the blankets, hiding from the dawn. Just as I start slipping under, the squeak of floorboards sends me sitting bolt upright, falling into my body so hard it drives the breath from my lungs.

  My father. The vaccine. It all slams into me in a gut-wrenching wave of grief that leaves me trembling. I push the tangled strands of hair from my face, pulling in a breath to steady myself as I take in my surroundings.

  I’m on an air mattress on the living room floor, my legs tangled in a silver Cartaxus sleeping bag Cole gave me when he ordered me to rest. The front door is open, and there’s no trace of the bags and weapons that filled the cabin when I fell asleep. My father’s notes are gone too. We hauled up all the paper files we could find in the basement, to bring them with us on our journey. Two tattered cardboard boxes of handwritten notes and a few dozen sticks of memory.

  Now they’re gone, and there’s no sign of Cole. My breath catches. Motes of dust rise from the bare floorboards, forming swirling patterns in the air. I scramble out of my sleeping bag and race barefoot through the front door, skidding across the front porch and down the steps to the driveway.

  The chill of the morning hits me like a hand across my face. The bare skin on my arms prickles with goose bumps. I spin around, ratcheting up my tech to search for Cole, and find him leaning against his jeep, his arms crossed, smirking at me.

  My hand flies to my heart, relief flooding me. “Dammit, Cole. I thought you’d taken off with the files.”

  His smirk grows into a smile. He’s wearing a black tank top and cargo pants with a teched-up rifle slung across one shoulder. The bandage from last night is gone—the skin across his shoulders that was shredded is now flushed and puckered, but his injuries are healed. His jaw is dusted with a day’s worth of dark stubble that makes him look older, and more interesting, somehow. My eyes linger on him longer than I intend them to.

  “I made you breakfast,” he says. “I want to get on the road this morning.” He reaches into the open window of the jeep and pulls out a metal flask, tossing it to me. The Cartaxus antlers are stamped on one side, but my name is etched into the other in the careful script I recognize from his sketchbook. I look up to see him swigging from an identical flask. Steam curls from the top when he lowers it.

  I turn the flask in my hand, feeling liquid slosh inside it. “Did you engrave this?”

  “I don’t want to get them mixed up.”

  “What, you don’t want girl germs?” I unscrew the top, sniffing it. Coffee and hazelnut. The scent makes my stomach growl. “Having spent years studying bioche
mistry, I can assure you they’re not real.”

  “I’m more worried about you.” He taps one of the black leylines curved around his face. “Agnes said you had hypergenesis, and my tech isn’t always stable. I don’t want to contaminate anything and make you sick.”

  “Oh.” That’s thoughtful. I take a sip of the coffee, picking up the chalky taste of nutrient powder mixed in with it. I hadn’t thought about nanite contamination. It’s probably not a concern unless Cole were to kiss me, which isn’t something either of us needs to worry about.

  The thought makes my eyes stray again to his face, until heat prickles at my cheeks.

  “Are you . . . okay?” he asks.

  I almost spit out the coffee. He can see me blushing. Of course he can—his tech probably has biosensors to check my heart rate and skin temperature. “Yeah, I-I burned my mouth,” I stutter.

  He frowns. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think I made it that hot.”

  “It’s fine,” I say quickly, turning back up the steps, the coffee gripped in my hands. “I’m going to get changed and check the cabin again.”

  He nods but doesn’t reply. I hurry inside, feeling his eyes burning into my back as I go.

  After I’ve changed into fresh clothes and finished the coffee, I check the cabin over one last time. All the doors are thrown open, each room rifled through for anything we might need on the trip. I won’t lock it when I leave. That’s basic courtesy in a post-apocalyptic world: An empty house belongs to no one. I don’t even know if I’ll come back. These walls hold too many memories of the last two years, of the things I’ve done to stay alive. I look back at the boarded-up windows, stepping away from the porch, giving the cabin a silent good-bye before I turn away.

  Cole is waiting beside the jeep with his hands stuffed in his pockets, his brow pinched as he squints up at the mountains. The lines of his face are smooth; he must have shaved while I was double-checking the rooms. The scent of his aftershave wafts around him in a haze of ice and pine.

  “Is that everything?” he asks.

  I glance down at a folder clutched to my chest, filled with every scrap of paper I could find. “Yeah. This is probably all junk, but I didn’t want to risk leaving anything behind. The rest of the notes are in the storage rooms in the mine shafts.”

  He blinks. “Mine shafts?”

  I smile. “That’s why my father bought this property. The family who used to own it secretly dug a bunch of shafts into the mountains, hoping to strike gold. I don’t know if they found any, but they left a whole network of tunnels. We get forest fires here sometimes, and the mines are a good place to hide. My father stored a lot of things in them, including most of his notes. The best entrance is up a hiking path on the other side of the mountain. We can take the fire trail there.”

  “You’re telling me Lachlan stored his genetic research notes in amateur-built, illegal mine shafts? That’s . . . eccentric.”

  “Did you meet my father?”

  His face softens. “You’re right. I don’t even know why I’m surprised.”

  The moment hangs in the air, and I let it linger, analyzing the way it feels to joke about my father. The same avalanche of grief I woke up to is still there, heaped against the forged-steel walls in my heart, but there’s more than that. The wound of his death aches, but he was too complex a man to feel just one emotion for. Part of me is furious with him for tasking me with this—for throwing me together with a stranger and putting the world’s fate on my shoulders. But part of me is overjoyed, too. I want to shout his name, to laugh and celebrate the fact that he coded a vaccine.

  Then, deeper down but refusing to be silent, part of me is curious about the man I spent so little time with. Cole seems to have known him well, and I want to ask him everything—how he knew my father, when they met, if he knew what his room at Cartaxus looked like. The questions spin around inside me, but every time I think about asking them, I see flashes of the scars on Cole’s chest, the terrifying code in his panel. I’m not sure if I’m ready to find out just how closely my father worked with Cole.

  “So we’ll get the notes,” Cole says, patting the side of the jeep. The rear doors swing closed, locking with the hiss of an airtight seal. “Then we can hit the road. I want to reach the border by nightfall.” He pulls open the passenger-side door, gesturing for me to get in.

  I walk over, admiring the jeep. It’s a beast of a machine. Black and hulking, with a roof of gleaming nanosolar sheeting. Diamond-dusted tires glint beneath the armored side panels, and the windows are dark and nonreflective. The interior is finished in the standard Cartaxus palette: black trimmed with more black, and subtle hints of gold.

  “This is a nice machine,” I say, climbing in, setting the folder on my lap.

  Cole snorts. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  He climbs into the driver’s side and pulls his door closed. The tires send out a spray of gravel as we lurch up the driveway, swinging onto the fire trail that winds around the outside of the mountain. The jeep seems to be doing most of the driving, but it still has a steering wheel, and Cole keeps one hand resting on it constantly.

  “What about the clonebox?” I ask as the cabin disappears into the trees behind us. My father said we needed two things—his notes and a clonebox—to unlock the vaccine.

  “I have a few ideas about where to find one.”

  I raise an eyebrow. Hospitals sometimes have cloneboxes, but they’re usually only found in research facilities. They’re rare machines, though it’s debatable that you can call them machines, since, technically speaking, cloneboxes are alive.

  If you’re testing brand-new gentech code, it’s not safe to try it on a person. Badly programmed code can be lethal, so scientists test their ideas on cloneboxes instead. They’re two-foot cubes of steel and glass, filled with cylinders holding millions of synthetic cells in liquefied form. The cells are able to be recoded to match the DNA of whoever jacks their panel into one—to clone them, effectively. Only, the cells you’re cloning aren’t in the form of a person—they’re a soup of blood and muscle and brain tissue.

  It makes sense that we’d need a clonebox to study the vaccine, because the code running inside Cole is locked to his panel. When we jack him into one, the cells inside the box will act like an extension of his body, and the vaccine should spread to them. That solves the problem of getting the live code out of Cole’s arm, but it doesn’t help with the problem of how to decrypt it. The answer to that should be in my father’s notes, and once we have both, we should be able to release the vaccine.

  Cole leans forward, peering up at the mountains through the windshield. “Do you have neighbors?”

  “Not anymore. Why?”

  He squints. “I’ve been getting strange readings from that mountain ever since I got here. I think it might be people, but I can’t tell where they are, and I’m not catching any words.”

  My skin prickles. “Maybe they’re not talking.”

  “For two days?”

  “They might not talk at all anymore if they’re Lurkers.”

  Cole looks confused by the word. Of course he does. He’s spent the last two years in airlocked comfort, with HEPA visors and decontamination chambers. He’s probably never killed for immunity, never had to choke down a dose or see a child, lost in the Wrath, turn on their own mother.

  I rub my arms, looking out the window as the trees fly past. “You know about the Wrath, right? How the scent of second-stagers makes people crazy? How it . . .”

  “Makes them eat infected people?”

  I nod, suddenly aware of the scent of immunity wafting from my skin and of what I did to get it. I force the thought away. “That’s a neurological response, like psychosis. When the Wrath takes over, people lose themselves, and some of them never come back. We call them Lurkers. They travel in packs, and they’ll kill and eat you whether or not you’re infected.”

  Cole raises his eyebrows. “I’ve heard stories about people like that, but I alwa
ys thought it was Cartaxus propaganda: Don’t leave the bunkers or you’ll get murdered by people who kill for sport.”

  I shake my head. “It’s not like that. They’re more like wild animals, like bears or wolves. It’s like they’ve regressed to their basic instincts. They seem to recognize each other, and form packs to hunt together, but they tend to stay in the woods like animals do. That’s why we call them Lurkers. Don’t get me wrong—they’re bloodthirsty, and if you run across a pack, they’ll try to kill you, but they’re not hard to avoid.”

  “That’s good,” Cole says, speeding up when we hit an open stretch of the trail. “Because I’d like to avoid them completely.”

  The trail rises through the forest, winding closer to the entrance to the mines. Cole keeps peering through the windshield, frowning, as though trying to see something hidden in the trees on the mountain.

  I open the folder on my lap. He glances over. “Where did you find that?” he asks. “I thought I checked everywhere.”

  “In the basement, behind the cabinets.” I flip through the loose mix of stained papers. Most are scribbled diagrams and calculations, nothing that can help us. My father must have used a kind of encryption on the vaccine that he’s used before, maybe in his time at the cabin. There must be instructions somewhere in his notes, but nothing I’ve seen so far is helpful. I shuffle through the rest of the papers in the folder, pausing when I reach a watermarked sheet with gold-embossed lettering at the top.

  Cole glances over, raising an eyebrow. “You got into the biomath program at Cambridge?”

  I nod, reading the letter, remembering how excited I was when it arrived. We’d only been at the cabin a few months, and I applied in secret to a special program for minors, hoping to impress my father. I sent a portfolio of my code, and they offered me a full-ride scholarship for the next year. Cambridge was where my father had studied, and I thought he’d be proud of me, but we ended up having a fight about it when he found out.

  Too young, he said, and too far away. He promised to teach me more than they could. I locked myself in my room and fumed about it for days. Then Dax showed up, with his tilted smile and easy charm, and I began to see the advantages of studying at home.