This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  “Tell me what?”

  Leoben glances up at a camera in the ceiling, then pulls the bottom of his tank top up.

  I gasp. His chest is exactly like Cole’s—same size, same shape—except Leoben’s is covered with tattoos of eagles, bears, and wolves. That’s not what makes me gasp, though. It’s the scars rippling beneath the tattoos. The network of slashed, puckered skin covering his chest.

  “They did it to you, too—” I start, and then I remember. It wasn’t Cartaxus who gave Cole his scars. It was my father. There are five files in my backpack, but I’ve only opened one. For some reason I assumed they’d all be about Cole.

  But that was naive. Of course there’s more.

  “There were five of you, weren’t there?” I ask. “You, Cole . . .” It suddenly hits me. “And Jun Bei.”

  Leoben nods, lowering his shirt.

  “My father did that to you, didn’t he?”

  “He did it to all of us. He wanted to see what was inside us, to see how we worked.”

  “But why? What was he trying to do?”

  Leoben’s eyes narrow. “You want me to justify my own abuse? I was a child, Agatta. Are you really asking me why he did it?”

  I turn my head away, stung. He’s right. There’s no excuse for what my father did. There’s no possible reason for torturing five helpless children.

  “So he hasn’t told you about Jun Bei?” Leoben asks.

  “He mentioned her. He said she was smart, she was tough—”

  “Tough,” he snorts. “Yeah, that’s a euphemism. This one time, when we were kids, a nurse was trying to get Cole to swallow a Geiger pill to monitor a radiation treatment. Those things are huge, and she accidentally dislocated his jaw. Jun Bei bounced across the room, cute little thing, and stuck a pair of scissors into the nurse’s neck. Took three surgeons to save her. We didn’t get scissors after that. They made us eat with plastic knives and forks for the next ten years.”

  “Jesus,” I gasp.

  “Yeah, she was a blast,” Leoben says, stepping closer. “She’ll put you in the ground if she finds out you’re sleeping with Cole.”

  “We’re not sleeping together. He’s just helping me.”

  “Yeah, helping you into bed. I can smell you all over each other.”

  “It’s not like that,” I say, my cheeks burning. “And it’s none of your business.”

  “I’m his brother,” Leoben says. “Maybe not through DNA, but through everything that counts. I know him well enough to see that you’ve got into his head.”

  “That’s the protective protocol—”

  “It’s more than that,” Leoben snaps. “You know it, and so do I. I just want you to know that Cole’s been broken before. He doesn’t need you playing games with his heart, not now he has a chance of getting Jun Bei back. Those two are meant to be together.”

  I drop my eyes as the elevator slows. Beneath the sharp scent of my immunity, I can smell it too. Ice and pine. Cole’s aftershave on my skin. Just the slightest hint of it brings back the feeling of waking up this morning, locked in the circle of his arms. I didn’t mean for it to happen, I don’t think either of us did, but that doesn’t change the fact that my first reaction when I woke was to pull him closer.

  It makes no sense. Leoben’s right—Cole has a chance at finding Jun Bei again. No matter what I think of her, I heard the love in his voice when he said her name. Once we’ve released the vaccine, he’ll go looking for her. That’s the whole reason he came on this mission. That’s why he’s doing this.

  For her.

  Deep down, part of me twists at the thought. A stab of jealousy, even though I know I have no right to feel it.

  “I’m not playing games,” I whisper. “I never intended for us to get close.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” Leoben mutters. “But there’s nothing quite as dangerous as an Agatta’s best intentions.”

  CHAPTER 19

  THE ELEVATOR JERKS TO A halt, and the doors slide open to reveal a stark concrete room with a space-grade airlock set into the wall. The frame is circular, and its gleaming steel doors overlap like scales, opening out from the center. The words WASH-AND-BLAST are stenciled in red above it, and the whole room stinks of disinfectant, that same sharp scent I remember from the soap I used at boarding school.

  I shuffle out of the elevator, following Leoben to a desk beside the airlock. A guard stands at attention, wearing a mirrored visor and a black uniform with the Cartaxus antlers stamped in gold across his chest.

  Leoben shoots a grin at the guard. “We’re booked in as part of Dr. Crick’s party. Priority alpha, code thirteen.” He glances at me. “That means we’re as VIP as it gets.”

  The guard just nods. “Yes, sir. Your reservation has been processed. Your entry is approved, but I’ll need to scan your personal items and weapons.”

  Leoben starts unbuckling his holster. The guard turns to me. “No explosives are permitted in the Wash-and-Blast, ma’am. Your personal items can pass through the vacuum airlock.”

  “I don’t have any explosives,” I say, clutching the backpack’s straps. My genkit and my father’s files are in there, and I can’t risk losing them.

  “The scanners in the elevator detected a genkit in your personal items, ma’am,” the guard says. “Priority thirteen means you can keep it in your possession, but it’s not permitted inside the airlocks. If it self-destructs, it’ll set off the airlock’s pressure-sensing glass and lock the entire facility down.”

  I stare at him. Genkits don’t just randomly blow up. They have self-destruct sequences to stop them from being used to hurt people, but it takes a lot of work to make them actually explode. Most of them just belch smoke when they self-destruct. You have to be running dangerous code with the lasers fully primed to get a genkit like mine to truly detonate.

  I consider explaining this to the guard, but Leoben looks back at me and shakes his head.

  “Hand it over, Agatta. You’ll get it back.” He lays his holster on the counter. Another handgun is concealed at the small of his back, and a knife comes out of his boot. He empties his pockets, pulling out a packet of chewing gum, a lighter, and a length of wire that I’m guessing is a garrote.

  If the guard is surprised, he doesn’t show it. He arranges Leoben’s arsenal in a plastic tray and slides it through a steel hatch in the wall. I swing my backpack off reluctantly, and he sends it through too, then pulls a black scanning wand from his pocket.

  “Panel check.”

  Leoben holds his forearm out. Five black leylines snake up from his panel, intertwined with his tattoos. The guard swipes the scanner over Leoben’s panel, and a light on its handle blinks green.

  “All clear. Your panel, ma’am.”

  I hold out my bandaged arm. “It was damaged, and now it’s nonfunctional. I’ll need to get it replaced.”

  The guard swipes the scanner over my arm, then repeats the motion. “Looks like it’s regenerating, should be done soon.” The light on the handle of the scanner blinks green, and the guard steps back. He swipes his arm over a sensor on the wall, and the airlock slides open. “All clear. Welcome to Homestake.”

  “What . . . what do you mean it’s clear?” I stare down at my arm.

  “He means shut up and go in.” Leoben grabs my shoulders, guiding me into the airlock. The tiny steel room is just big enough for the two of us, with a metal grating for a floor and a gaping air vent overhead. The door closes behind us, leaving us in the dim glow of a row of lights built into the floor.

  “What did that green light mean?” I ask.

  “It means your father found a way to trick our systems into letting in nonstandard tech.”

  “Oh,” I breathe. “Of course.”

  “What kind of wireless chip do you have?”

  “Basic model, K-40 line. It barely connects to anything.”

  “Easy to tweak, though,” Leoben says. “He could have planted a mirror.”

  I look up at him. “You kn
ow how to code?”

  He rolls his eyes. “I’m not just a pretty face. I don’t know shit about DNA, but my hardware skills are pretty solid.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Then you’d know that a mirror won’t run on a K-40 encoding. You’d have to use a Joburg echo.”

  “Ah,” he says, tilting his head back. “Of course, that’s old-school. Nice.”

  He looks down, meeting my eyes, the hard lines of his face softening for a second before he looks away.

  An electronic voice starts up in the ceiling. “Air cycling starting now.”

  The vent above us opens with a crack, and ice-cold air blasts over us with enough force to make me cower against the wall. I scrunch my eyes shut, huddling with my arms over my face for what feels like an eternity, until the vent slams shut.

  The voice starts up again. “Air cycled. No viral particles detected.”

  “Y-you could have warned me,” I say through chattering teeth.

  Leoben shrugs. “What would be the fun in that?”

  I glare at him, clutching my arms around myself as the wall beside us slides open. Beyond it, a long hexagonal corridor stretches out with another circular door set into the far end. The corridor’s walls are slick concrete covered with tiny nozzles, and the floor is another metal grating. My eyes water with the sharp scent of disinfectant.

  “Please proceed to airlock two.”

  My stomach sinks. “I’m guessing this is the wash part.”

  Leoben nods, pushing me through. “You guessed right.”

  The door slams shut behind us with a hiss of cold air, and the grating below us starts to shake.

  “Anything you want to warn me about this time?” I ask.

  Leoben looks me up and down, a low smile on his face. “There’s no preparing for this, Agatta, but you might want to close your eyes.”

  I obey. A humming sound starts up, growing louder until it makes the whole corridor shudder. Thousands of tiny jets of ice-cold liquid hit my skin, choking the air with the harsh vanilla scent. I hold my breath but still get a splash of bitter liquid in my mouth, and cover my face with my hands, coughing. After a few seconds the streams cease, and I suck in a lungful of air that burns lines of fire through my sinuses.

  “Please keep your eyes closed. Stage two is almost complete.”

  “Almost complete?” I splutter, opening my eyes just long enough to see a hurricane of air spiraling through the airlock. It’s like a horizontal tornado, strong enough to make me stumble until Leoben grabs my wrist, yanking me upright. My wet hair whips around my face, covering my mouth. Something above us clicks and the airflow ceases as suddenly as it began. The third and final steel door opens with a hiss.

  “Thank you,” the mechanized voice says. “Welcome to Homestake.”

  “I guess I know why Dax was complaining about the airlocks,” I say.

  Leoben chuckles, dragging me through the door and into another concrete room with a row of doors along the far wall.

  “You look hilarious,” he says, shaking his hands, splattering the walls with disinfectant. His clothes are dripping, but the fabric must be hydrophobic, because his tank top already looks dry. The blue shadow under his eyes isn’t smudged at all, making me think it might be a pigmentation app, and a masterfully well-coded one at that. My backpack is waiting on a scratched steel counter, along with Leoben’s gear. He swings his holster back around his shoulders and tucks his weapons away. “You ready to see the civ levels?”

  I nod, shivering. My eyes are burning, one ear is blocked, and my hair is strewn across my face in tangled ropes, but I’m ready. I’ve spent two years wondering what this place looked like on the inside. I want to know what my father told me to stay away from.

  I pull my backpack on, shoving the sopping hair from my face. “Okay, let’s go.”

  Leoben leads me through one of the doors and into a cargo-size elevator. It runs sideways, groaning, then drops for what feels like an eternity. When it finally shudders to a stop, I hear a murmur of voices on the other side, and for some reason I can barely breathe.

  The doors slide open. I expect to see more concrete, or rows of cells.

  Instead, I find myself in the middle of a street.

  There are trees and flowers. Bright green grass. Cobblestoned paths wind between cafés, shop fronts, and pretty stone buildings. I know there’s a ceiling above us, I know we’re underground, but all I can see when I look up is a perfect azure sky.

  Families are strolling and chatting, all dressed in blue—some in overalls, some in T-shirts with the Cartaxus logo stamped on the front. At a sprawling café across from the elevator, people are sitting on couches drinking what looks like coffee from steaming white mugs. Families are sharing meals. Children are running between tables, playing and shrieking as their parents pass plates of food to one another.

  Suddenly I know why nobody who went to Homestake ever came out.

  This place isn’t a prison. It’s a goddamn paradise.

  Leoben takes my elbow, leading me out of the elevator, but his touch is gentler than when he led me in. He must sense the shock rolling through me. “You okay, Agatta?”

  I nod dumbly, staring at the people. With a single glance, I can tell that none of them have killed for immunity, never lost themselves in the darkest moments of the Wrath. They’ve never starved through winters or hidden from Lurkers. They’ve never watched a crying child with bruises on his skin detonate in the middle of the street.

  They all rushed into Homestake as soon as it opened, and they’ve been here ever since—eating muffins, sipping coffee.

  I’ve been dying from the inside out, and why? Because my father told me to? Because he said Cartaxus was evil?

  The file about Cole in my backpack looked pretty evil to me too.

  A ripple of silence spreads through the crowd. Heads turn slowly, until every eye is locked on me. I see horror in their faces. Snatches of their words echo around me.

  “New arrival, just a kid.”

  “Look how thin she is. I can’t believe she made it this long.”

  “I wonder what she did to survive.”

  I pull my wet sleeves over my hands, hiding my dirty nails, suddenly seeing myself as the crowd must see me. As a scarred, filthy freak. A monster. Someone who’s killed to survive rather than come here.

  Why would my father keep me away from this?

  “You want food or something?” Leoben asks.

  I shake my head, staring at the crowd. “I could have been here, but he made me promise to stay away. He never called, he could have told me . . .”

  Leoben’s eyes narrow.

  “I killed people,” I whisper, my voice breaking. “I didn’t want to, but he said . . . He said I had to stay away.”

  “Oh, goddammit,” Leoben mutters, scraping a hand over his face. “Come on, Agatta, let’s get you out of here.”

  He throws his arm around my shoulders and guides me into a building where we follow one hallway after another until I have no idea where we are. An apartment complex of some kind. Numbered white doors are set into the walls, lined with vacuum-style airtight frames. Most are closed, but some have been left open, giving me glimpses of the rooms inside. They’re tiny, with beds that fold into the wall and counters with jet-cookers and sinks, the occasional stack of dirty dishes. I see a boy my age sprawled on a beanbag, his eyes glazed over, watching a film in VR. He lets out a snort of laughter as we pass, and it hits me like a punch.

  Every glimpse, every smiling face is another open wound.

  How could my father keep me away from this?

  Leoben guides me through an open door. “Dax booked us a couple of rooms, even though we’re not staying. This one’s marked for you and Cole. It, uh, it should have everything you need, and Dax and I are right down the hall. You can shower, get yourself together before we leave.”

  I walk inside, looking around. Two bunk beds are set into the back, each with a curtain that slides closed to create a tiny priv
ate space. Another fold-down bed forms a couch near the door, opposite a kitchenette, and a tiny bathroom is tucked into the back.

  Everything is just a little small, a little cramped, but there’s a bed and food and water. I could have been happy here.

  Leoben shifts uncomfortably, standing in the doorway. “I guess we weren’t the only ones Lachlan screwed up. I sure as hell wouldn’t want him for a father. I’ll send Cole down when he’s finished debriefing.”

  I nod, standing with my arms wrapped tight around my chest, swallowing hard against the rising pressure in my throat. Leoben leaves without another word, letting the door hiss closed behind him.

  When he is gone, I finally let myself break.

  CHAPTER 20

  BY THE TIME COLE FINDS me, I’ve eaten, showered, and dressed in clean Cartaxus clothes with my hair knotted in a plait down my back. My eyes are red rimmed, despite the ice-cold water I splashed on them in an attempt to hide the fact that I’d been crying.

  I’m not crying anymore. I’m angry. My shoulders are tight with tension, and I have to fight the urge to get up and run, to break something. I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor with my genkit and the musty folders of my father’s notes scattered beside me.

  Cole barely glances at me as he hurries in from the hallway, drenched in the airlock’s disinfectant. He’s still annoyed at me for coming here. He avoids my eyes as he slides the door shut behind him, but his face goes white when he sees the folders on the floor. “Where did you get those?”

  “In the mines. Cole, I need you to tell me what my father did to you.”

  He presses his hands to his eyes, drawing in a long, slow breath. “Okay, but I need to shower first.”

  He walks silently into the bathroom and shuts the door. I flick open Leoben’s file for a moment before closing it again. The notes inside still don’t make much sense to me, and seeing the photograph in the back of a young and frightened Leoben feels like an invasion of his privacy. He was just a child. They all were. My stomach churns at the thought.

  Why the hell was my father studying them?

  Cole soon emerges from the bathroom, dressed in fresh clothes, the sharp vanilla scent of Cartaxus’s soap rolling off his skin. He grabs a bottle of water from the kitchenette and sits down on the floor beside me, scanning the folders before picking up his own file. His face is impassive. It’s the same mask I’ve seen on him before, and I recognize it now for what it is: his way of dealing with too much pain.