This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  I nod. I’ve written similar code for the Skies. Blunt attacks to cripple systems. That’s how I got into Cole’s panel. I’ve never seen anything like that in my father’s work before, though. The only thing he turned his coding skills to was DNA.

  “Is this a Cartaxus thing?” I ask.

  “Kind of,” Leoben says. He runs one hand over his buzzed white-blond hair, frowning. “It was written by Jun Bei, actually. Come to think of it, she could have been the one who got us into this mess. The hack that blew up the lab was all explosions and data corruption. That’s classic Jun Bei.”

  “What?” I spin to Cole. “What is he talking about?”

  Cole shifts uncomfortably. “Jun Bei . . . she was a coder, a prodigy. She worked with your father at Cartaxus before the plague, but they never got along.”

  “Oh, they got along,” Leoben mutters. “Like a goddamn house on fire.”

  My stomach flips. I turn to Dax. “Did you know about this?”

  Dax looks as stunned as me. “Jun Bei’s name was on a lot of the code I saw, but she left before the outbreak, so I never knew her. Cartaxus said the attack came from the Skies.”

  Leoben snorts. “Yeah, right. Those guys can’t code for shit. There’s no way they’re the ones who did it.”

  My head spins. Leoben’s right—I’ve been trying to tell Cole all along that it wasn’t the Skies who hacked Cartaxus and destroyed my father’s lab. It was someone else, someone better. Someone who knew their way around Cartaxus systems. From the way Leoben’s talking, it definitely sounds like it could have been this girl.

  “Cole,” I say, my voice shaking. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “I would have told you if I thought it was important, but it’s not. It couldn’t have been her.”

  “My father is dead,” I say, my hands in fists. “I don’t know what could possibly be more important than that. You said she hasn’t talked to you in years. How could you know it wasn’t her?”

  “I know her,” Cole says. “She wouldn’t have done it.”

  “Well, maybe you didn’t know her as well as you think.”

  The words are out of my mouth before I can think them through. Pain flashes in Cole’s eyes before his face turns to stone.

  Leoben lets out a low whistle. “You two have some crazy shit going on.”

  “Yes,” Dax says, looking between Cole and me, frowning. “I’m sure you’ve both been through a lot. The sooner we get the clonebox, the sooner we can be done with this. I still say Homestake is our best option.”

  Cole shakes his head, still glaring at me. “It’s too risky. You can go in, but Catarina and I are staying here.”

  “Who put you in charge?” I snap.

  Cole’s jaw clenches. “You’re the one who said we couldn’t go to Cartaxus. I know you’re angry, but this is a bad idea. We’ve got enough juice to drive to the closest town. We’ll find some more solars, and we’ll get the jeep working. We can still get to the lab tonight.”

  I grit my teeth. Cole’s damn right I’m angry, but that’s only part of it. I’m tired, I’m confused, and I have stitches in my arm. There are files in my backpack that frighten me, I’m on a mission I don’t understand, and Dax is standing beside me, with a Comox and a Cartaxus bodyguard.

  Part of me still wants to stick to the plan and play this safely. The smartest idea is to drive to the lab and look for a clonebox on the way. But part of me wants to see Homestake, the bunker I’ve been living an hour away from for the last two years. I want to know exactly what it is that my father kept me away from.

  And if I’m really honest, part of me wants to piss off Cole.

  “Are you sure you can get us out of there?” I ask Dax.

  He nods. “Easily.”

  “Then let’s do it,” I say. “Let’s go to Homestake.”

  CHAPTER 18

  DAX, COLE, AND I SIT strapped into the Comox’s cargo hold while Leoben leans back in the pilot’s seat, his feet crossed on the controls. The Comox is a drone, but apparently Leoben knows how to fly it if the onboard AI “goes stupid” in midair.

  Cole is furious. His arms are crossed, his face is stormy, and he hasn’t spoken to me since I agreed to Dax’s plan. But that doesn’t matter. Once we decrypt the vaccine, he’ll go off to find Jun Bei, and I’ll never have to see him again.

  The thought makes my stomach clench. I don’t know if it’s some ridiculous, inexplicable jealousy, or the fact that Leoben thinks Jun Bei was the one who killed my father. It sounds like she was a piece of work. I don’t understand why Cole was defending her. She left him and hasn’t contacted him in years.

  But that’s what Dax and my father did too.

  I lean against the Comox’s side, watching fields and forests pass below us. The jeep has disappeared into the distance, following behind us on the ground. Leoben transferred one of the batteries from the Comox into it, which should give it enough juice to drive itself to Homestake. It’s still stocked with the boxes of my father’s notes, but I have the five musty folders I found behind the kayak stashed in my backpack. Something tells me they’re the only notes we’re going to need.

  “Almost there,” Dax says, peering through the window. I strain against my harness to get a clearer view. We’ve reached Homestake’s buffer zone—a mile-wide patch of wasteland that circles the bunker to keep blowers from detonating nearby. The perimeter is lined with a deep trench and rolls of razor wire atop a towering concrete wall. Inside it, every building is bulldozed, every tree is gone, and the roads are covered in a dark layer of ash.

  It looks like a war zone. Despite this, crowds of people are still huddled on the perimeter, trying to get in. They’re probably infected. The blowers love the bunkers—they come from miles away in the desperate hope that Cartaxus can help them. The crowd is being kept away from the checkpoints by gun-bots on arched metal legs that skitter around like giant steel spiders. A low-altitude army of drones hovers above them, ready to incinerate anyone who might break through.

  “Think they have enough security?” Leoben calls back. He’s joking, but Cartaxus is right to guard the wasteland fiercely. I’m sure Homestake’s airlocks are sophisticated, but the buffer zone is still their best defense. No airlock is foolproof, and it only takes a single virus particle to cause infection. Keeping the blowers a mile away from the bunkers is the only way to guarantee the air is safe.

  “It won’t be enough for much longer,” I say, pointing down at a plume on the perimeter. One of the people has detonated, sending the others scattering. The cloud drifts sideways, flattened by the wind, but even from here it still looks enormous. The others follow my gaze, but none of them seem to understand what I’m saying.

  Of course they don’t. They haven’t learned to read the clouds like I have, to analyze the shape and color and guess how the wind might change. My life has depended on it ever since the outbreak. They’ve all spent the last two years inside.

  “That cloud is twice as big as they used to be,” I explain. “The virus is evolving, and the detonations are getting stronger. A mile is still a decent radius to keep the air clean, but pretty soon those clouds are going to reach the bunker.”

  Dax stares down at the cloud. “Hopefully that won’t be a concern for much longer.”

  I nod, watching the cloud drift across the buffer zone. “Yeah, hopefully.”

  The Comox drops lower. In the center of the wasteland, a single lookout tower juts from the blackened ground. This is Homestake, at least what we can see of it. Almost all of the bunker is underground, built into an enormous abandoned gold mine. I’ve seen the lookout tower from afar, and I’ve skirted the perimeter on supply runs with Agnes, but I’ve never seen it up close like this. The sheer size of the place stuns me, along with the realization that eighty thousand people are currently beneath me. It’s hard to get my head around.

  Dax taps the black cuff on his forearm. A diagram of the bunker flickers on the Comox’s floor, projected by a row of lig
hts on the cuff’s side. “The top third of Homestake is military,” he says. “The civilian levels are underneath, in a different airlock system. The only point of access to the whole place is the central shaft.”

  I look over the diagram. The bunker is shaped like a house built entirely underground, with the civilian floors forming a giant rectangular section. The military levels slope in above it like a roof, linked to the ground by an elevator shaft that looks like a chimney.

  “The clonebox is here,” Dax says, gesturing to a red dot near the top of the bunker. “It’s in the main lab, which I have access to, but alarms will sound as soon as it’s disconnected. Cartaxus thinks we’re here to stay for a few nights, so I’ve got rooms booked in the military barracks to avoid suspicion. We’ll check in, and you can shower and have a meal. The only problem might be your panel. None of the hypergenesis-friendly apps your father wrote for you are on the list of approved Cartaxus tech. I’ll talk to the scanning officers, and—”

  “There’s no need,” I say, pulling my sleeve back, showing him the bandage wrapped around my forearm. A few black stitches poke out from between the layers of gauze, and a thin line of blood has seeped through from the incision.

  Dax frowns. “What happened?”

  “Someone cut out one of my function cores. The panel might repair itself, but I don’t know yet. I don’t have a backup node, so it could be ruined.”

  Dax’s face darkens. “I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll help you fix it once this is over. We’ll get it running again, I promise. But in the meantime, I suppose it’ll make this easier. You and Leoben can check in to the barracks, but Lieutenant Franklin and I will need to be debriefed on the mission they think I sent him on. That might take a few hours.”

  “Won’t they want to talk to me?”

  “They will, but not today. I told them you were a friend of mine, and that you’d be frightened. I convinced them to give you a day to settle in. Don’t worry, we’ll be in and out in a matter of hours. After Lieutenant Franklin and I are done debriefing, I’ll get the clonebox, and we can leave.”

  “What happens then? How do we get out?”

  Dax spins the diagram, zooming in on the top few levels. “Once we start the kick simulation, we’ll have control of the elevators and the doors to the parking garage. Homestake will think it’s under attack, and we’ll evacuate under the pretense of keeping me safe. We’ll send the Comox to the Los Angeles bunker while we drive north—you and Cole in his jeep, Leoben and me in another. By the time Cartaxus figures out that we’re not in the Comox, we’ll be halfway to the lab, and they won’t have a hope of finding us.”

  I stare at the diagram, trying to get a feel for the scale of the bunker. It seems to stretch impossibly far down into the earth. Ever since Homestake opened, I’ve tried to imagine what it’s like. A giant, forbidden fortress whose drone patrols I could sometimes glimpse in the distance. Thousands of people, locked underground. Living, eating, breathing.

  I look up at Dax. “I want to see where the civilians live.”

  He shakes his head. “Like I said, the civilians are in a different airlock system. It’s a pain in the ass moving between them.”

  I cross my arms. “I want to see it.”

  “Sheesh, talk about a pain in the ass,” Leoben yells back.

  Cole smirks, the first flicker of emotion I’ve seen since we took off.

  “I mean it,” I say. “I want to see where they live.”

  “Fine,” Dax says, sighing. “I’ll move the booking to the civilian levels, but you owe me for this. Those airlocks mess up my hair.”

  “What if I like it better messed up?”

  The Comox dips sharply, then rises just as fast, making me jerk against my harness and slam back into the wall.

  “What was that?” I mutter, rubbing the back of my head.

  “A glitch.” There’s a slight edge to Leoben’s voice. “You better hang on, Agatta.”

  I glance at Cole, to see if hitting my head activated his protective protocol, but his eyes are still blue. The smirk on his face has grown into a grin. Dax crosses his arms, watching Leoben with a stony expression on his face.

  We approach the lookout tower, and the Comox drops smoothly, landing on a black airstrip, sending up clouds of ash and dust. A laser scanner throws a scarlet grid across us, and a row of gleaming gun-bots ambles toward us, forming a line between us and the base.

  The Comox’s rotors slow. My harness releases automatically, and I stumble forward, grasping my backpack to my chest. This time Cole’s arm shoots out instinctively to steady me, grabbing my hand.

  His eyes meet mine for the briefest second before he lets go and looks away.

  “Welcome to Homestake,” Dax says, opening the door, letting in a swirling wall of dust.

  I throw my hand over my eyes, coughing, squinting at the gun-bots still lined up around the Comox. “Where do we go now?”

  A black-gloved hand takes my elbow, and I look up into deep brown eyes lined with blue shadow. “You’re with me, Agatta,” Leoben says. His voice is sharp. “These two have to debrief. I’ll take you through the airlocks to the civ section.”

  I sling the backpack on, nerves jumping inside me. Leoben has the same rippling energy as Cole, but it rolls off him in a completely different way. Cole is reserved, focused, controlled, but Leoben looks like he’d kick someone through a wall just for the thrill of it.

  The steel in his eyes when he looks at me tells me he doesn’t like me at all.

  He steps to the door, leading me by the elbow. Cole grabs his arm as we leave, pressing their panels together. Something seems to pass between them, though I’ve never seen anything like it. It must be a way to transfer messages without Cartaxus listening in.

  Leoben’s eyes narrow, and he nods. I don’t know what Cole told him, but when Leoben pulls me down the ramp, his fingers dig into my skin. He looks back once, meeting Dax’s eyes, but doesn’t say anything. He just pulls me into the wasteland. I swallow, jogging to keep up with his strides.

  He definitely doesn’t like me.

  Dax and Cole stay by the Comox while Leoben leads me past the twitching gun-bots and through an airlocked door in the side of the tower. We pass through a series of dimly lit hallways with sloped floors that I have a feeling are designed in a labyrinth, to make it difficult for anyone to break in. I’m lost after just a few turns, unsure if we’ve been climbing or dropping underground, if we’ve been moving forward or walking in circles. Eventually we come to an unmarked elevator that opens as soon as we reach it and closes behind us with a hiss.

  Leoben leans against the side of the cab, crossing his arms. A whine starts up above us as we begin to drop.

  “You and Dax seem to get along,” I say.

  He grunts but doesn’t reply.

  “Has he been . . . okay? In the lab, were he and my father treated well?”

  He looks me up and down, taking in the scars on my cheek, my dirty fingernails, the lines of my too-thin shoulders. “Compared to you, they were living like kings. I can’t believe you were an hour away from this place. Eating doses to stay alive? You guys on the surface are all insane.”

  Something tells me he’s trying to change the subject, but I can’t help rising to his bait. “It’s not crazy to want to be free.”

  Leoben’s eyes glitter coldly. “Try telling that to the good people who’ve been forced to stay down here because murderers like you have kept the plague alive.” He steps closer—close enough that I can tell he’s trying to intimidate me. It takes all my strength not to shrink away from him. “You people on the surface always talk about freedom,” he says, “but you don’t see that you’re the ones keeping the rest of the world locked away. You’re the jailers, not Cartaxus. If we rounded you all up at gunpoint like we should, pretty soon the virus would be gone, and we could all move back up to the surface in safety again.”

  I hold his gaze. “That’s ridiculous. You think the virus would just disappear if eve
ryone on the surface joined a bunker? There are millions of frozen doses and bodies out there that could thaw and blow at any time, and every lab in the country has viral samples that could be accidentally released. The only way to protect the people in these bunkers is to release a vaccine.”

  He leans back again. I can’t tell if he’s frustrated or impressed that I’m not intimidated by him. “Okay, so the virus wouldn’t disappear,” he says. “But it wouldn’t evolve, either. If we’d rounded everyone up in the outbreak, the first vaccine Lachlan wrote would have worked.”

  A chill creeps down my spine, and it’s not just from the callous way that Leoben keeps talking about rounding up millions of people. It’s because this time he has a point. Cole said my father coded a vaccine in the first weeks of the outbreak, but the virus evolved and made it obsolete. If Cartaxus had forced everyone on the surface into a bunker, the virus wouldn’t have had a chance to mutate. The vaccine would have been safe—fragile, but safe. There’s a chance society could have rebuilt itself after that.

  Only, that’s not true.

  If everyone on the planet had let themselves be rounded up, we wouldn’t all have lived to see the rebuilding. Eloise wouldn’t have survived. Neither would Novak, or half the people in the Skies whose lives depend on unsanctioned code.

  “Cartaxus always talks about safety,” I say, turning Leoben’s words back on him, “but you don’t realize that you’re the ones forcing us to live in danger. If you dropped your restrictions on unsanctioned code in the bunkers, then millions of people whose lives depend on it wouldn’t be forced to live on the surface.”

  “Is that why you stayed up there?”

  “My father told me to stay away from Cartaxus.”

  He lifts an eyebrow. “You look like him,” he says finally. “Same hands, that’s weird. I never thought I’d recognize a pair of hands.”

  “You knew my father?”

  “Cole didn’t tell you?”