This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  “Novak pushed the testing. She wanted the vaccine to be broadcast as quickly as possible, and Cartaxus signed off on it. The vaccine is still working against the virus, but this code is running too, and I don’t understand it. I can barely even read it.”

  I close my eyes, my heart pounding. Four million lines of rogue code, sent by my own trapdoor into every family, every child. The thought makes me want to be sick. It could be lethal; it could be toxic. I can’t believe Cartaxus didn’t check the code before they let Novak send it out.

  “Maybe it’s just administrative junk from the decryption,” I say. Meaningless filler code that shouldn’t interact with a person’s DNA. “You can clean it up in a patch, right?”

  “Possibly.” Dax’s voice is solemn. “All I know is that this code has gone out to everyone with my name on it, and I have no idea what it does.”

  I push my fingers through my hair, bunching it in my fists, trying to get my head around everything that’s happened. I survived the procedure. I had a memory suppressant in my system, generated by an implant which added a four-million-line daemon to the vaccine.

  “That’s not all,” Dax says. “I asked about your eyes because according to the clonebox, they’re supposed to be green.” He pulls a pen-size swabber from his pocket, chrome finished with a needle point on one end, and a pad for swabbing on the other. “Do you mind?”

  I hold out my arm. “They’re gray—you can see for yourself. Maybe there was something wrong with the readings from the clonebox. Maybe everything is fine.”

  “Maybe,” he murmurs, running the swab across the crease in my elbow. He flips it deftly to press the needle point to my wrist. I barely feel it pierce. Dax’s eyes glaze over, and he points the pen at the wall, shooting out a flickering projected display. A report appears. The first sample is the one from my elbow—dead skin cells, grown days ago, shed before the procedure. The second sample is platelets from my blood—fresh and constantly renewed. Biological summaries of both samples glow on the cinder-block wall. They detail every gene, from the mutation that lets me digest dairy to the family of genes that control the size and shape of my teeth.

  Dax blinks, and the summaries disappear, leaving a single result remaining. My eye color.

  Sample 1: Female. 16–18. Eyes: gray.

  Sample 2: Female. 16–18. Eyes: green.

  I feel myself begin to sway. This scan isn’t checking for apps; it’s measuring the immutable, unchanging DNA inside my cells. Gentech can’t change that. It’s supposed to wrap around the genes like paper around a present, leaving my natural DNA untouched.

  But if this report is right, my underlying DNA has been changed. It’s like wrapping paper around a present and somehow changing what’s inside the box.

  “This is impossible,” I breathe, but the proof is glowing right in front of me. According to this scan, I stepped into the vat with gray eyes and stepped out with green. It’s a violation of everything I’ve learned about coding. It’s a breach of the fundamental laws of gentech. It should be impossible. But then again, I should be dead.

  I have no idea what to believe anymore.

  “What the hell did my father do to me?” I spin to Dax. “This has to be linked to the hypergenesis code we found. The implant, the vaccine, the way I survived the procedure. He did something to me, and he made me forget it.”

  I close my eyes and see a flash of the mountains I remembered during the decryption, but the image blurs as soon as I try to focus on it. It was a place I knew. I was there. A drum starts up at the back of my mind, but I still can’t hear it clearly enough to drag the memory out.

  When I open my eyes, Dax’s face has paled. The light above us blinks out, and the music outside dies away, leaving only the crackle of the bonfire. The cheering and singing of the crowd morphs into a swell of confused voices.

  “Power outage?” I ask, groping for the light switch on the wall. “Dax, pull up your sleeve. I need some light.”

  But he doesn’t reply.

  My fingers brush the door handle, and I swing the door open, letting in a slice of light from the windows on the other side of the hallway, where the bonfire is raging. “Dax? Are you okay?”

  He’s standing like a statue, his lips moving slightly, the way he looks when he’s deep in a coding session. The freckled curves of his cheekbones glow orange, lit up by the bonfire’s flickering light.

  No, not the bonfire. The light is coming from his panel.

  It’s suddenly glowing bright orange.

  “What the hell is happening?” I ask.

  “It’s the vaccine,” Dax whispers. “It’s incredible.”

  “What’s incredible? Why is your panel orange?”

  “It’s an attack.” Dax’s brow furrows with concentration, his body growing rigid. “But I can’t stop it. You need to get help, Princess. Quickly, run.”

  My stomach lurches. I want to ask more, but the urgency in Dax’s voice sends a knife of fear through me. I back out of the room nervously and scan the hallway. It’s empty, with no sign of Cole or Leoben. Beyond the windows, the crowd is wild and raucous again, the sound of firecrackers echoing in the air. The celebrations are back in full swing.

  “Cole?” I call out, jogging down the hallway. I reach a corridor and glance down it, but it’s empty. Everyone is outside at the fire. Cole must still be talking to Leoben.

  A crack rings out behind me, and one of the windows shatters. I drop instinctively into a crouch. Squares of broken glass ricochet off the walls, skittering across the tiles, making me suddenly aware of my bare feet. With the window broken, the sound from outside rushes in—the roar of the fire and a frenzy of wild, shouting voices.

  Adrenaline kicks through me. The sound I heard before wasn’t firecrackers, it was gunfire. The people around the fire were cheering just a few minutes ago.

  Now they’re screaming.

  I push myself up, inching higher until I can see out the closest window. Dax said this was an attack, but he didn’t say who was behind it. If it’s Cartaxus, I’d expect copters and drones, but the sky is empty. In the flickering light of the bonfire all I can make out is a writhing mass of silhouettes.

  I creep closer, dodging the broken glass, staring into the night. There are no trucks, no gun-wielding troops rounding people up. There isn’t any order to the fighting at all, but the people in the crowd are all screaming and fighting with one another. It looks like a mass attack of the Wrath, but that makes no sense. There are no second-stagers here, no hint of the scent to send the crowd into a frenzy. It’s like everyone has suddenly just gone crazy.

  And all their panels are blazing a bright, neon orange.

  I suck in a breath, dropping back into a crouch, panic rising inside me. This isn’t an attack—there are no soldiers out there, no drones dropping bombs. This is worse. It’s the vaccine. The daemon code that was added to it in the decryption must be affecting these people somehow. It’s sent them all into the Wrath, and now they’re killing one another like animals.

  And it’s all my fault.

  A door creaks back down the hallway. I turn my head, tensed. Dax steps from the school’s sick bay, his shoulders hunched, his movements jerky. His panel still glows orange, and he has something in his hand. It looks like the swabber, but in the dancing light of the fire it might be a gun.

  “Going somewhere, Princess?” Dax asks, tilting his head. His voice is off, eerie and low.

  “Dax?” I ask, my voice wavering. “Dax, what are you doing?”

  He lifts his hand toward me, his shadow leaping across the walls. The bonfire’s light shows his face twisted in a snarl. I realize a heartbeat too late that he’s lost his mind too, and I push myself to my feet and run.

  That’s when the bullet hits me.

  CHAPTER 39

  THE COLOR BLEEDS FROM MY vision. The doors set into the hallway blink into black-and-white smudges as I fly from my feet. I land hard on my side and roll to my back, gasping for air. The ceiling must b
e dark, but right now it’s a sheet of pulsing, throbbing white.

  Dax shot me. I know this even though there’s no pain yet. I felt the bullet. I heard the sound.

  I still can’t believe he actually shot me.

  “Dax,” I gasp, rolling to my side, sucking in a lungful of air. The wound in my shoulder erupts like a fireball. I try to push myself to my knees, but the pain licks through me, and I fall back to the floor.

  Footsteps echo down the hallway. I pull myself into a ball, waiting for another bullet. Instead, Dax just stands above me, pale and wide-eyed. He stares in confusion at the gun in his hand.

  “P-Princess?” He unloads the gun, hurling it down the hallway, then drops to his knees beside me. He presses his hands to his face in horror.

  “Dax,” I cry. This is him again. Maybe the attack has passed. I grit my teeth, grabbing the wall, forcing myself up. The crowd outside is still fighting, screaming, roaring. Gunshots pepper the air. Dax seems to be himself again, but everyone else still sounds insane.

  He takes my arm to help me up. “You have to run, Princess. I’m losing control. I can’t fight it much longer.”

  “But I need your help. We need to stop this—I can’t do it without you.”

  His eyes glaze over. He’s fighting whatever the hell this attack is. “I don’t think this is happening anywhere else,” he whispers. “It’s just Sunnyvale. Cartaxus, they . . . they don’t believe me.” His voice breaks. “Princess, I shot you. You need to run before it comes back and I hurt you again.”

  “No,” I say, grabbing his collar. “Just listen to me, Dax. I know you can fight this. You have to try.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s too late. I can’t stop it. I can feel it—I want to hurt you, I want to . . .” His voice rises into a growl.

  “No,” I cry, stepping away as he doubles over, struggling for control. “Dax, listen to my voice. Fight it, please! I can’t do this on my own!”

  “No!” he shouts. He grips his hair in his fists and screams, every muscle in his body rigid. A shudder passes through him, and his eyes snap up to mine, wild and empty.

  The snarl is back on his face. Every trace of my friend is gone.

  “Oh shit.” I stumble backward, finally remembering the nightstick. I jerk my hand up to my neck, searching for the pendant. Dax is on me in a blur, his hands whipping out to grab both my wrists, slamming me back into the wall.

  My shoulder erupts with pain, the back of my head bouncing off the concrete. Pinpricks of light dance in my vision. Dax’s hands fly to my neck. He wrenches the silver chain away and waves the pendant in my face.

  “Nightstick, Princess? Very sneaky.”

  His voice is low, eerily calm. He tosses the pendant to the floor, and it slides across the tiles, slipping underneath a row of lockers. He brings his hand back to my face, gentle at first, then slides his fingers around my neck.

  “I know you’re still in there, Dax,” I gasp, trying to claw his hand away. “I know you care about me. You don’t want to hurt me.”

  “Oh, but I do,” he says, his eyes shining. “You don’t know how much I want to hurt you, Catarina. I want to cut your skull open and see what Lachlan left inside you.”

  I close my eyes, panic thrashing in my chest. This isn’t Dax; this is something that’s taken over his body—some dark and twisted version of my friend. I don’t know how to bring him back. All I can think to do is keep telling him the truth and pray that wherever my Dax is, he’s able to hear me.

  “Dax, I need you,” I plead, staring into his eyes. “You’re the only one who can read the vaccine. I can’t fix it without you.”

  For a heartbeat, something flickers in his face. A hint of doubt, just the slightest sign that my words are reaching him. His gaze wavers, his hand growing loose on my neck.

  Then his eyes go hard, and his lips curl back.

  “Liar!” he yells, shoving me into the wall. My wounded shoulder smacks into the concrete, dragging a scream of pain from me. “Do you think I’ve forgotten how you were always better than me? Always reading Lachlan’s code like it was a goddamn picture book?”

  “No!” I cry, my vision blurring. “Please, Dax! Stop it!”

  He draws his hand back, curling it into a fist. Using a strength I didn’t know I had, instincts I’ve never felt, I clutch his shirt and drag him to me, smacking my forehead into his nose.

  He roars, clutching his face, blood spurting between his fingers. I push off the wall and try to run, but I’m not fast enough. He grabs me by the hair, jerking me back. I fall hard to the floor, my scalp burning, the hallway spinning around me.

  “You’re dead now, Princess!” He drives a boot into my ribs.

  I gasp, spitting blood, trying to curl into a ball. He drives another kick into my side, knocking the wind from me. I choke for air as he rolls me over, flipping me to my back, and straddles me, pinning me to the floor. My shoulder is a raging, howling sea of pain. My strength is fading from me, my muscles growing shaky.

  “That’s right,” he mutters as I shudder, my hands clawing uselessly at the floor. The ceiling is a spinning mess of shadows, my lungs clenching like fists.

  “P-please!” I manage to cry out as he wraps his hands around my throat. “Dax, please! You don’t want to do this! Listen to me!”

  But he’s not listening. He’s not there. His nose is bent and bleeding. He lifts his hands to wipe it, and time slows down to a crawl.

  The world grows silent. He’s going to kill me. I can see it happening so clearly that it plays like a film inside my head. His hands will drop back down, stronger than mine, tech enhanced, and they will slide in a cruel ring around my neck. He’ll hold me down and squeeze my neck until I stop fighting, until my lips are blue and cold.

  There’s no bringing him back from this. There’s no reasoning or begging. The man above me is no longer my friend.

  “I’m sorry, Dax,” I breathe, in the heartbeat of time when his hands are off me, in the fraction of a second I’m able to move. “I really am sorry.”

  His eyes grow wide as I lunge up, every muscle in my body aching, and tear his ear off with my teeth.

  CHAPTER 40

  DAX SCREAMS, RECOILING BACKWARD. I spit his ear out, the metallic taste of his blood filling my mouth. It’s so horrible and intimate it makes my stomach turn. I force down the urge to vomit and scramble to my feet.

  My shoulder is a fireball of pain. I lurch to the row of lockers, searching frantically for the little black pendant. A glint of silver catches my eye as Dax staggers across the hallway, blood streaming down the side of his neck.

  “Come on,” I breathe, grabbing the chain, sliding the pendant out from underneath the lockers. I twist the two ends between my fingers like Cole showed me. A jolt of electricity prickles across my skin, filling the air with the scent of burned plastic.

  Dax draws one hand back to punch me, and then his panel blinks off and he falls to the floor.

  I let out a cry of relief, dropping the pendant, standing over Dax’s crumpled body. His nose is broken, his ear is gone, and his face is streaked with blood. He looks so pitiful that I don’t want to leave him, but I don’t have a choice. Cole said the nightstick would only work for a few minutes. I need to get outside, find the jeep, and get myself to safety.

  I’m the one who ruined the vaccine, and now I need to find a way to fix it.

  I turn and careen down the hallway, stumbling into the lockers in a daze. Gunfire cuts through the screams outside. My shoulder throbs, the back of the bathrobe wet with blood as I run blindly past the classroom doors, searching for the exit.

  There. The airtight doors. I haul them open with my good arm, scrambling into the street outside. The air is thick with smoke, ringing with gunfire. The bonfire casts a flickering light across the people in the road, and my breath catches in my throat.

  Their eyes are wild and inhuman. Every face is a bloody snarl. Their forearms are all glowing the same orange as Dax’s panel. They’re fight
ing, biting, clawing one another apart in front of my eyes, and I’m the one who did this to them. This is all my fault.

  I’m the one who crafted a piece of code to force the vaccine into each of their arms. I just wanted to help them.

  Instead, I drove them all insane.

  Gunfire echoes in the street. Chips of concrete hit my legs, sent flying by a hail of bullets that slams into the curb behind me. I stumble back, searching wildly for the source, and spot armed figures leaning out of the windows of a nearby building. They’re roaring with laughter, shooting everyone below them, and there’s nowhere in the street to hide, no safe path to follow.

  I’m going to have to run.

  I bolt into the road, dodging the crowd, trying to remember the way to the jeep. A sudden light flashes through the windows of the shooters’ building, and a blast rips through the air like a thunderclap. My eardrums pop, the ground trembling. Flaming rubble flies up from the building, arcing parabolically through the night. A billowing cloud of smoke rises in a plume as the roof falls inward, the building crumbling into dust.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” I breathe, stumbling back. Debris rains from the sky. The wild-eyed people around me scatter, scrambling for cover. I turn and run, my ears ringing from the blast when I hear a voice, distant and faint.

  “Catarina!”

  It’s Cole, calling out for me. Fierce, alive, and sane.

  The sweetest sound I’ve ever heard.

  “Cole!” I scream, spinning around, sprinting back down the street. Clouds of ash and dust are spewing from the explosion. There’s glass on the road, and my feet are bleeding, but I’m so close. We’re going to make it out of here. “Cole, I’m coming!”

  The air sings with gunfire as I run. More bullets whiz past me, hitting cars parked on the side of the road, shattering their windows.

  “Take cover!” Cole shouts. “I’m coming for you, but I need to set off another blast!”

  I lurch off the road, pulling myself behind one of the cars. A second explosion rips through the air, making the night flash into day. A building near the school explodes, sending bricks and bodies flying in a mushroom cloud of smoke. My ears ring, whining in the aftermath as rocks and rubble fall like rain, the air thick with gray, chalky dust.