This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  It’s too tall, too powerful. It looks like a tornado. A solid plume, fifty feet across, spreading once it hits the clouds. I scrunch my eyes shut and open them again, hoping it’s a trick of perspective, but it’s not. It’s more than twice the size of any plume I’ve seen before. It rises like a rocket, the color of misted blood.

  There’s no denying it. It’s a Hydra cloud.

  CHAPTER 27

  COLE’S EYES ARE GLASSY AND black, his forehead beaded with sweat as he wrenches the steering wheel, swinging the jeep around. It sways as we hurtle away from the lookout tower, bouncing through the rubble and dust of Homestake’s buffer zone. The cloud billows behind us, a wall of red mist, racing in from the perimeter. Far above us, three peaks of gas rise like crimson mountains. My breath catches as the weight of what I’m seeing hits me.

  Three blowers just detonated at exactly the same time, forming a single cloud, bigger than any I’ve seen before. They always go in groups—sometimes minutes apart, sometimes hours—but I’ve never seen them blow like this, creating a single, towering cloud. This plume will spread for miles. Homestake’s buffer won’t be enough. The cloud is too tall, too strong.

  Without its airlocks, Homestake would be doomed.

  I twist in my seat to stare out the window as we skid through the wasteland, speeding toward the concrete perimeter wall. The mist is a living thing, heaving through the air, billowing out across the ash-strewn ground. It swallows the bunker whole, engulfing the lookout tower, an unstoppable wave of hot, rolling scarlet.

  “What the hell is that thing?” Cole shouts.

  “It’s a Hydra cloud.”

  “It can’t be.” Cole jerks his head to look. “It’s too big.”

  “It’s three blowers,” I say, turning back to the front, gritting my teeth as pain shoots through my leg. “Three times as strong.”

  “The airlocks . . .”

  “I closed them.”

  “How?” Cole wrenches the wheel, swerving through the rubble. A pair of gun-bots lie on their backs, their laser scanners splashing the ground. Their arched steel legs flail like overturned insects. Jun Bei’s simulation must have destroyed every layer of Homestake’s security.

  It’s the most impressive code I’ve ever seen.

  Jealousy flares through me. I haven’t encountered many other viruses that were better than my own code, and Jun Bei’s made mine look like a joke. Cole said she and my father used to code together at Cartaxus.

  Maybe that was why he was so distant at the cabin. Because I didn’t measure up to her.

  I bite back the thought, reaching for my backpack, hauling it into my lap. The pain in my knee is spreading down my calf.

  “How?” Cole repeats. “How did you close the airlocks?”

  “I kicked off a lockdown.” I flip open my backpack. “I had to make my genkit self-destruct.”

  We reach a checkpoint on the perimeter, littered with more flailing gun-bots. The steel barricades are bent and smoking, blackened with scorch marks. Leoben and Dax must have blasted their way through before us. Cole floors the accelerator, and we screech through and onto a highway, leaving Homestake and the billowing Hydra cloud behind us. I rifle through my bag for the medkit, pulling out a vial of healing tech.

  Cole’s jet-black eyes grow wide. “What have you done, Cat?”

  “I did what I had to. I told you—I needed a bomb.” I hold the vial in my teeth and pull my pant leg up to expose my knee. The fabric catches on the wound, and I gasp at the sudden rush of pain. A trickle of blood runs down my calf. The flesh is swollen, the fabric tight. I grit my teeth, closing my eyes, and yank the fabric back.

  The pain is an avalanche. It roars in my ears, drenching my senses. Silver crystals spin in my vision. I blink them away, staring down at what’s left of my swollen, ruined knee.

  It’s worse than I thought. The skin is purple and cracked, revealing deep pink fissures that run like claw marks across my leg. The swelling forms a dark, violet bruise along my calf, snaking through my veins, reaching all the way to my ankle.

  The only sign of hope are blisters that have risen like drops of silver in a ring around the spot where I jacked myself in. My body is trying to eject the nanites wreaking havoc in my cells. That’ll help, but it won’t stop the damage from spreading. There’s no way to stop this without a genkit and some seriously brilliant code. These nanites will keep rampaging through me until they die—maybe in minutes, maybe hours. All I can do is bear the pain and pump myself full of healing tech, trying to keep the wounds under control.

  I uncap the healing tech vial with shaking hands. Cole looks over and stiffens.

  “Oh, no, no,” he whispers. The jeep’s tires screech. We plow off the side of the highway and into the trees. Leaves smack against the windshield, branches scraping against the doors, and then we burst into a clearing and shudder to a stop.

  “No, no.” Cole’s seat belt flies off him. His voice is frantic, his eyes inky pools of blackness. “Why, Cat? What did you do to yourself?”

  “I did what I had to,” I say, bracing myself through a rush of pain. “I told you we needed to close the airlocks. Eighty thousand people, Cole.” I jam the healing tech into the ruined flesh of my knee, ignoring the stab of pain, the way my flesh gives way like rotting fruit.

  “Dammit, Catarina!” Cole flinches, turning away, the tendons in his neck taut. “I didn’t want you to hurt yourself.”

  “I didn’t have time to do anything else.” I glare at him. “I made a decision, and you disagreed. This is what happens when you don’t listen to me.”

  Cole scowls, then kicks open his door and marches around the front of the jeep, making his way to my door. The veins on my leg grow darker, rippling as the healing tech races into me. Some of the deeper cracks in my skin tighten, weeping tracks of pink, dilute blood down my calf. The flesh is starting to repair itself, and with enough healing tech, I should recover completely.

  Not that it matters. Come nightfall, we’ll be at the lab, running the decryption. No amount of healing tech will save me then.

  Cole swings my door open and stares at me, his shoulders tight, his eyes slowly retreating to blue. He scrapes a hand over his face. “I’m going to carry you to the back and dress the wound. I don’t know if I can stop the damage, but I want to try.” He reaches out to pick me up, but I push him away.

  “Don’t touch me. I can walk.” I slide down to the ground and land on my good leg, but the movement sends a jolt through me.

  “No you can’t.”

  I close my eyes, breathing through the pain. He’s right, but I’m angry, and the last thing I want is for him to carry me.

  “Cat, let me help you.”

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  I open my eyes. Cole’s face is strained, his hands stretched out, hanging in midair. He looks frustrated, like he’s ready to snap and pick me up over my protests, and it just makes me angrier—that he wants to help me now, but he wouldn’t lift a finger to help Homestake’s civilians.

  “I can walk,” I growl, taking three painful steps to the back of the jeep, holding its dust-caked side to keep myself upright. Every movement brings a burst of pain, but I grit my teeth and shuffle forward, ignoring the way Cole stares at me.

  When I reach the back doors, they swing open automatically, and I manage to haul myself up so I’m sitting in the back, leaning against the side. The effort leaves me shaking. Lines of silver-tinted blood trickle down from the cracked skin of my knee. Cole follows me like a shadow, silent and tense, and stares at the wound on my knee for a long time.

  Without a word, he reaches past me and grabs his backpack, sliding out a medkit full of bandages and syringes. Some look like healing tech, but others are red and black, marked with glyphs I don’t recognize. Probably some ungodly Cartaxus tech. He pulls out a thick, wet-looking bandage and sprays it with something before wrapping it around my knee.

  It’s like ice.

  I gasp, arching m
y back, stunned by the sudden mix of cold and pain. Goose bumps shoot across my arms. After a second the chill fades, and the pain in my knee starts to soften, slowly dropping into numbness.

  “You did this to make your genkit self-destruct?” he asks.

  I nod, chewing my lip. My little trusty, beat-up genkit. It did me proud for three long years, and now it’s gone. The thought brings a flash of grief.

  “You should rest for a couple of days before the decryption,” he says. “Your body needs to heal before you put it through something like that.”

  My head snaps up. How does he know what the decryption will be like? Surely he can’t know that it’s going to kill me.

  He raises an eyebrow. “I’m not an idiot, Catarina. I know you’re scared, and I’ve been on the end of enough genkit cables to know that Lachlan doesn’t write painless code. It’s going to hurt you, isn’t it? You’re not telling me because you’re worried I won’t let you go through with it.”

  I can’t answer. I don’t know what to say, and I don’t trust my voice to remain steady.

  He sighs. “Look, you can do whatever you want, okay? But Lachlan was the one who gave me the protective protocol, and I like to think he did it for a reason. I’m trained for this, I can assess the risks—”

  “Is that why you left Homestake’s airlocks open? Because you were assessing the risks?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” he says, his jaw clenching. “Those parking levels weren’t designed to withstand a blast. They were designed to cave in to protect the bunker if a blower got inside and detonated. If I’d blown the glass with a grenade, it could have brought the ceiling down and crushed us both. Do you have any idea what would happen if you died?”

  “If I died? There were eighty thousand people in there.” I gesture to the sky, where the plume has spread into a muddied smudge. “That cloud could have infected them all.”

  “And you’re the key to the vaccine,” he snaps. “If you die, we’re all doomed. My job is to protect you, and that’s what I was doing. Do you think I wanted to risk those people’s lives?”

  “I don’t know, did you?” My voice is sharper than I intend it to be. I know I’m lashing out, but I can’t stop myself. I’m frustrated, my knee is ruined, I’ve lost my genkit, and there are only a handful of hours left until I die.

  “Of course I didn’t want to hurt them,” Cole says. “Dammit, Cat, what kind of monster do you think I am? I didn’t even want to leave Homestake. I felt better in that place than I have in years. I wanted to stay there with you, I thought we could—” He cuts off, drawing his hands back from my knee.

  My breath catches.

  Did he just say he wanted to stay there with me? Does he mean he wanted to stay there together?

  “What . . . what do you mean? What about Jun Bei?”

  He drops his eyes. “You saw her code, how ruthless it was. She killed fourteen people when she escaped from the lab.”

  I suck in a breath. Fourteen people. Who the hell is this girl? What did my father’s research turn her into?

  “That’s what she was like,” Cole continues. “I used to be like that too—we all were. All we wanted to do was hurt people after what they did to us.” He turns his forearm so his panel faces up, revealing the black leylines snaking up his arm. “I let Cartaxus turn me into this because I wanted to forget. I wanted to be a weapon without feelings, but I’m not. I see that now, and I don’t want to hurt people anymore. I want to help them, like you do.”

  “Cole . . .”

  His ice-blue eyes lift to mine, and he swallows, stepping closer. This time I don’t push him away. I can barely even breathe. For a second I think he might kiss me, and with a jolt I realize that I want him to.

  I want his lips on mine. I want to grab his shirt, to pull him to me, to close the distance between us and fold myself into his chest. I want to feel the way I did this morning. Safe, warm, secure.

  But that can’t happen. I can’t let it.

  It’s not safe to sit here and let Cole look at me like this, sparking something inside me that feels like a window bursting open. Not when he’s driving me to my death. He can’t give me a rush of hope.

  Cole can’t look at me like this and make me want to live.

  “We can’t,” I say, turning my face away. I don’t need to say it, to give a voice to the energy crackling between us. Both of us can feel it. Both of us know it’s there, but I have to find a way to crush this before it grows any stronger.

  “I know you feel this,” he urges. “I know it’s not just me.”

  I close my eyes. He’s right. There is something flowing through my veins, some magnetism tugging me to him, dragging me by the heart. It’s all I can do to brace myself against the jeep’s side, trying not to hear the softness in his voice, to feel the way his scent is curling into my senses.

  I’m a heartbeat away from pulling him closer, from turning my face up to his. I need to stop this madness, and I need to stop it now.

  I open my eyes. “Where’s Dax?”

  The question is a slap. I hate myself for asking it, and I hate the pain that flies across Cole’s face. It only lasts a moment before a wall slams down and he steps away again, wiping any trace of vulnerability away.

  “He’s with Leoben. They’re north of us, on the highway.”

  I nod, biting down hard on my lip. “We need to tell them about this plume if they haven’t already seen it.”

  He turns to the cloud on the horizon. “They’ll be fine. They’re both vaccinated.”

  I shift my weight, gingerly sliding out of the back of the jeep. A dull ache shoots through my knee, but the worst of the pain is gone. “It’s not them I’m worried about—it’s the virus. I’ve never seen multiple people blow at the same time like this, but I should have anticipated it. This changes everything.”

  “Why?”

  I swallow, putting weight on my leg, wincing through the pain. “Because it means the virus is evolving, and it’s doing it fast. I can’t rest, not even for a few days. It’s not safe. We need to hurry, Cole. We need to unlock the vaccine.”

  CHAPTER 28

  WE DRIVE FOR THREE HOURS with barely any talk between us until we hit an empty stretch of highway near the Montana border. We met up with Leoben and Dax just north of Homestake, and they’re now following us, carrying the clonebox in their jeep. According to our dashboard, we’ve been skirting around a cyclone cell, but the storm has shifted direction, and we’re now driving through its center. Rain thuds against the windshield, then flies off reflectively, repelled by the glass’s ultrahydrophobic coating. Walls of rain and angry clouds stretch as far as I can see, forming a canopy above the eerie desolation of Wyoming’s wide, abandoned plains.

  My eyes are locked on the horizon, scanning for more Hydra clouds, even though my nonenhanced vision is too poor to see through the rain. There’s a twinge of a headache in the base of my skull, but it’s nothing like the full-blown migraines I usually get. That might have something to do with the healing tech pulsing through my veins, working constantly on my knee. It’s still aching, but the worst of the pain has passed.

  I keep running my fingers over the gauze wrapped around my forearm, searching for a hint of silicone growing beneath my skin. It’s too swollen to feel much, but I don’t think there’s anything there yet, and there might not be for at least another day. When Marcus cut out my healing tech, my panel only had to regrow a tiny part of itself. Now the backup node in my spine is regrowing an entire panel. I already have the network of gold-flecked cables stretched throughout my body, so I only need to regrow the silicone and reinstall the apps. Still, if we keep to the schedule we’re on now, I won’t live to see it turn back on.

  Brave, I tell myself. This is my mantra. I will be strong; I will be brave. All I have to do is let Cole drive, let Dax set up the equipment, and find a way to say my good-byes. Not that I have many people left to say good-bye to. Only Agnes, and now I can’t even comm her anymore. She m
ight have tried to call, or sent me a text, to tell me what happened to her. I won’t be able to check until my panel is grown.

  Which means I’ll probably never know.

  Cole glances over, watching me prod at my forearm. “Are you sure it’s safe for you to grow a normal panel?”

  I shrug. “I think so. I mean, my father was the one who gave me the backup node that’s growing this. He probably thought I’d find it myself. I should have, really. I was just too scared to do anything with my panel after Cartaxus took him. He probably expected me to jack in as soon as he left, and hunt around in the code. I would have figured it out eventually. It wasn’t very well hidden.”

  Cole nods, looking doubtful. “Why would he have hidden this from you?”

  I drop my eyes. “I have a theory about that, too.”

  “Oh?”

  I chew my lip. “Well, he came up with a treatment for my hypergenesis. I don’t know what it was, but I think that’s what he was hiding. And since hypergenesis is only seen in humans, which means it’s probably part of the anthrozone, I was thinking . . .”

  Cole’s hands tighten on the wheel. “You think he developed the treatment based on the research he did in the Zarathustra Initiative.”

  I nod, closing my eyes. Silhouettes of the five children flicker through my mind, along with scraps from the experimental notes in their files. Surgical examinations. Toxicity tests. Extended sensory deprivation. Cole said my father developed the Hydra vaccine based on the research he did on Leoben, but what if the treatment for my hypergenesis came from that work too? He couldn’t have explained it to me without telling me the truth.

  I would have learned what he did to Cole and the others. I would have hated him.

  “What did you mean earlier?” I ask quietly. “When you said you wanted to become a weapon because of what Cartaxus . . . what my father did to you.”

  He shifts. “Let’s talk about that after we get to the lab.”

  “I want to know. It’s important. What happened to you and the other kids?”