This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  “Cole,” I choke out, clambering to my feet, gaping at the devastation around me. Cole is the one blowing up the buildings—he’s doing it to protect me. Smoking debris stretches out as far as I can see. The ruins are strewn with bodies, littered with patches of fire and chunks of twisted metal.

  Cole stands in the middle of the road amid clouds of swirling ash, his eyes twin pools of perfect blackness. He has a rocket launcher on one shoulder, his rifle in his other hand. The panel on his forearm is a sweet, brilliant blue.

  “Cole, you have to stop!” I cry.

  “They’re trying to kill you.”

  He swings his rifle in a clean arc, letting off a round of bullets. A group of people fighting near me fall to the ground, screaming. I lurch out from behind the car. “Stop, Cole, it’s not their fault—it’s the vaccine! We need to get out of here. We need to stop this!”

  “Stay in cover!” he shouts.

  “No!” I cry, running into the street. If I stay in cover, he’ll keep killing anyone who poses a threat to me. But that’s everyone, and it’s all my fault. “Stop shooting them! Cole, please, we have to go!”

  The gravel in the road bites into my feet as I run for Cole. Everywhere I look, I see carnage. Dust-coated bodies are sprawled on the street, their orange panels slowly blinking out. Countless more lie among the ruins. Cole has blown apart two buildings and sent the crowd scattering, killing anyone around me.

  But there are more of them coming.

  I hear them before I see them. I turn my head back, my breath catching. A mass of snarling, shouting people is swarming down the road, running straight for us. They must have seen the flashes of light and heard the blasts of the explosions. Now there are hundreds of them, charging for us, stampeding down the street.

  There are too many of them to fight, even with a rocket launcher.

  “Cole,” I cry, coughing in the dust. “We need to run, now!”

  As if in response, the jeep hurtles around the corner, its horn blaring. The headlights splash over me as it screeches to a stop. It swings around, skidding across the rubble littering the street, its doors flying open as it turns.

  “Get in!” Cole roars, his gun aimed at the crowd.

  I race forward, shots ringing out around me, and lunge headfirst through the open door. Cole launches himself into the driver’s side, reaching over to yank the door shut behind me; then the jeep plows back down the street.

  “Are you okay?” Cole shouts, flooring the accelerator. Gunshots thud against the windows. “Did they hurt you, Cat?”

  I shake my head, seeing blood and bodies every time I close my eyes. “Just a . . . a flesh wound.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I say. The jeep’s dashboard is a mess of warning symbols. “Do you know what’s going on? Is this happening everywhere?”

  “No,” Cole growls. “This is an attack. Cartaxus wouldn’t believe us until Lee sent them footage from his eyes.”

  “Leoben’s okay?”

  “He’s fine. He’s gone looking for Crick. Novak wasn’t affected either, along with half her scientists. Whoever’s doing this is picking and choosing who they target.”

  “This is the vaccine, Cole. There was extra code added to it. . . . And I gave it to everyone.”

  “Whatever’s happening, this sure as hell isn’t your fault.”

  I just shake my head. We speed past the visitors’ center, bouncing across the bridge. I grit my teeth, blood trickling down my back as the odometer ticks higher. We need to get away from here. I want to be miles from this madness before we even think about stopping.

  Two minutes pass, then four. We hit the freeway and screech up the exit, skidding onto the leaf-strewn road. My shoulder is a white-hot kernel of pain. I try to dig my fingernails into the palms of my hands, but nothing happens, and I realize that for the first time in my life, I’ve bitten my nails down to stubs.

  Cole eyes the blood on my face, my hands. “What happened to you, Cat?”

  I lean forward to show him the wound on my shoulder. “Sh-shot,” I stutter.

  Cole slams the brakes, cursing. He flies out of the jeep and is at my door in a blur, carrying me around to the back.

  “Shh,” he whispers, flipping the doors open, lowering me to my side on the crumpled sleeping bags. “It’s okay, just breathe, Cat. You’re going to be okay.”

  Cold air hits my back as he slices through the bathrobe, lifting the blood-soaked fabric away from the wound. He peels back the air-thin layer of the silver pressure suit, climbing into the jeep, straddling me in the tight confines. “Easy now. I’m going to give you some tech, and then I’m going to get you patched up.”

  I twist my neck to look up at him. When I had to cut out my panel, his protective protocol kicked in and he could barely look at me. Now there’s a bullet in my shoulder, and his eyes are a clear, soft blue. “Are you . . . are you okay to do this?” I ask. “With the protective protocol?”

  He pauses, watching me. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “I think I am.” He uncaps a healing tech vial and presses it to my back. A prickle of heat runs down my spine, and the pain starts to ebb away.

  “That’s good,” I breathe.

  He leans down to kiss my hair. “You might not think so in a minute. The bullet’s lodged in your scapula. I need to get it out.”

  I nod, clenching my hands tight. “It’s okay, I can handle it.”

  “I know you can.”

  When he leans back again, he has a palm-size yellow plastic box in his hands with a crank in the back that clicks when he winds it. The plastic is covered with deep scratches. I know what this is. It’s a golden retriever. An electromagnet. It’s going to yank the bullet out of me.

  “Are you ready?” he asks, holding the box to the wound in my shoulder.

  I nod, gritting my teeth, burying my face in my hands.

  The box lets out a whine, and the bullet hits it with a crack. Pain races through my back, arcing along my ribs.

  “It’s out, it’s out,” Cole whispers, spraying something icy on my back. It heats up once it hits my skin, hardening like plastic. “This’ll keep the wound clean until it closes on its own. The healing tech is starting to kick in.”

  I nod, shaking, my breath whistling through gritted teeth. The pain flares up before subsiding slowly. Cole’s gaze trails down my face to my neck. “Your neck is bruised, and your face. Cat, what happened to you?”

  A lump forms in my throat. “Dax . . . He was like them, Cole. He tried to fight it, but he couldn’t. He’s the one who shot me.”

  Cole’s face blanks. He turns to stare back down the highway, his eyes blinking instantly to black.

  “No,” I say, sensing his thoughts. “No, I need you here. We need to figure out how to stop this.”

  “It would only take a minute.” He stares down the road. “I have a sniper rifle. I could do it from the hill.”

  I close my eyes, pushing down the memory of Dax’s hands on me. His fingers around my neck, digging into my throat. A ball of rage spins in my chest, but vengeance isn’t what I need. That wasn’t Dax who hurt me; it was something else. The daemon he found, the four million lines added to the vaccine. I saw the change come over him as clear as day. It happened to everyone with the orange panels. It’s still happening to them.

  We need to stop it.

  “I need a genkit,” I say, pushing myself up, reaching for the side of the jeep. “If I can read the vaccine’s code, maybe I’ll understand what’s happening. Maybe there’s a way to turn this off.”

  “That’s a good idea—” Cole starts, then freezes. “Lee just commed me. He couldn’t find Dax, and he’s on his way here. He said Cartaxus . . . Oh shit, they’re sending drones.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Cole throws a sleeping bag over me. “Lie down, stay low. I need you to hang on to something.”

  “Cole?”

  He pulls the doors shut and climbs into the front.

  “Cole,
what’s happening? They’re not going to attack, are they?”

  He doesn’t reply. The jeep surges back down the freeway, and a high-pitched whine starts up in the distance. I scramble to my hands and knees, staring out the rear windows as points of light fly in over the mountains. Drones. Thousands of them, in a cluster-blast formation.

  Enough to blow all of Sunnyvale to oblivion.

  “Wait, Cole!” I yell. “Tell them to stop! You have to explain!”

  The jeep races forward, screeching along the freeway.

  “They’re not listening to me,” Cole calls back.

  I grab his backpack to steady myself. “You have to try again. Dax is down there—they can’t kill him!”

  We race around a corner, and I’m thrown into the window, staring in horror at the sky. The drones are hovering now, a thousand points of light in a geodesic dome above Sunnyvale’s ruined town center. I open my mouth to shout to Cole, but it’s too late. The formation scatters, and I know it’s over.

  I see the detonations before I hear them—brilliant streaks of light and a blinding flash that illuminates the midnight sky. Thousands of lives blink out of existence in the space of a heartbeat, blown into a cloud of dust.

  The jeep races up the freeway, tires screaming on the road.

  Five seconds later the shockwave hits us and throws us into the air.

  CHAPTER 41

  WHEN THE DARKNESS CLEARS, I’M in a laboratory looking through a window at three mountains that rise in the distance, carpeted in verdant green forest. I can’t remember how I got here. I’m dressed in gray, my hands are small, and my fingernails are bitten down to stubs.

  “Careful, honey.”

  I turn around to find my father behind me. He’s in a white lab coat with the Cartaxus antlers embroidered on the pocket.

  “You’re going to mess up the replication if you don’t watch those proteins.” He points to the glowing desk in front of me, where the hologram of a curled strand of DNA hovers beside a few lines of code. The DNA spins as I brush it with my hand, zooming in until I see the flaw in my work.

  “Is this better?” I focus until the image ripples and changes.

  My father nods, resting one hand on my shoulder. “That’s perfect, good girl.”

  Pride swells in my chest. I’ve been working so hard to please him, and I’m finally getting this right.

  “There’s something I want to talk about,” he says, sitting beside me. He waves a hand, and the hologram blinks and disappears. “It’s about the Hydra virus. You know about it, don’t you?”

  I nod. The scent, the detonations. I’ve been studying it for months.

  “So you know I’m working hard to find a vaccine, don’t you?”

  “Uh-huh,” I say with a child’s voice. “I know you’ll make one. You’re so clever.”

  The skin at the corners of my father’s eyes crinkles as he smiles. “There’s something I need your help with, but it’s going to be long and difficult. You’ll have to be very strong.”

  “I can do it,” I say eagerly.

  He smiles. “I know you can.”

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “Nothing yet. This is a special project. It will be hard, but we’ll be saving everyone if we get it right.”

  I clutch my hands into little fists. “We’ll beat the virus. I know we will.”

  “Oh, we’ll do so much more than that, darling. We’ll be saving people from themselves.”

  My father reaches for the glowing panel on my arm, but his fingers feel like fire where he touches me. The skin on my forearm splits and peels off in burning, brittle flakes. I jerk my arm away, clutching it to my chest, but the flakes are spreading fast, like cracks racing through glass.

  “What did you do?” I gasp.

  My father simply laughs as the cracks in my skin race up my neck, sending glowing flakes into the air like scraps of burning paper. My face blisters, burning away. I let out a scream, but my father just smiles down at me.

  “That’s my good girl.”

  CHAPTER 42

  I JOLT AWAKE, STARING AROUND wildly as the dream fades away. I’m on my stomach in the back of the jeep, wrapped in a silver thermal blanket. I can hear the steady sound of Cole’s breathing nearby, but I have no idea where we are.

  We were leaving Sunnyvale; that’s the last thing I remember—the daemon, the orange panels, the fighting. We got on the road to escape it, and then . . .

  Then Cartaxus bombed the valley.

  The memory hits me like a punch. I close my eyes, seeing the pinprick lights of Cartaxus’s drones. So many lives, gone. I thought releasing the vaccine would bring the world back to normal.

  Instead, I’ve made it worse.

  I lift my head to look around, wincing as the movement sends a jolt of pain through my wounded shoulder. We’re parked in the forest, and the jeep’s back doors are open, the air heavy with the scent of pine and wood smoke. It’s just before dawn. A layer of mist is curling in from the trees, wafting across the dew-spotted grass. We’re in what looks like an old national park campsite, complete with a stained cinder-block restroom and a few blackened fire grates.

  Cole is asleep on a mat beside the embers of a fire, his breathing steady and slow, his arms crossed over his chest. He looks cold, as though he lay down beside a warm fire and fell asleep before he could gather the energy to get a blanket. His eyes are lined with shadows, and a rash of dark stubble on his jaw tells me I’ve been unconscious for more than a few hours. At least one day, maybe two.

  My eyes lift to the horizon for a sign of where we are, and my breath catches in my throat.

  On the other side of the lake, three rocky peaks rise from the forest into a blanket of low-hanging cloud. I know these mountains. I saw them during the procedure and in my dream, and looking at them now tugs at something in my memory. Did my father bring me here? The thought crystallizes for a heartbeat before splintering, spinning back out of reach. It’s like a name on the tip of my tongue. A song at the edge of my hearing. Every time I think I catch it, it ripples away.

  I crawl to the back of the jeep to get a better look, pushing away the silver blanket. Cole’s eyes blink open, instantly black. He sits up in a blur and grabs the rifle lying beside him.

  “Cole, it’s okay. It’s just me.”

  His eyes snap to me, his pupils contracting. “Cat,” he breathes. “How are you feeling?”

  “I feel like . . . I feel like I got shot in the back.”

  “That’s a common side effect of getting shot in the back.” Cole stands up slowly, stretching. His movements are stiff, and I can tell that he hasn’t had much sleep since we left Sunnyvale. He’s still in the same dust-strewn, wrinkled clothes, and there’s a bandage on his arm that wasn’t there before.

  His eyes are bloodshot, like he’s been crying. My stomach clenches. “Did Leoben make it out?”

  “He’s fine,” he says, rubbing his face. “He’s not far from here.”

  I let out a sigh of relief. “You look awful.”

  “You’re not looking so great yourself.” He rolls his head from side to side, cracking his neck. “You got pretty beat-up. Some of the bruises rose while you were sleeping.”

  “Oh,” I say, bringing my hand up to my face. My cheeks and eyes feel swollen from where Dax hit me. “I was hoping that was just a dream.”

  “I should have gone back and killed him.”

  I drop my eyes. He means it. His voice is like ice, but it’s not the violence in his words that shocks me. It’s the flash of Dax’s snarling mouth, his elbow in my face, and the little voice inside me that says Maybe I should have let you.

  I swallow. “Well, I guess Cartaxus’s drones did that for you.”

  “No, Crick’s not dead. Novak got the bastard out, and he’s back to normal somehow. They’ve been all over the VR channels, taking interviews, talking about the vaccine.”

  “What?” I push myself up to my knees, clenching my teeth against the pain
. “So who triggered the orange panels? What are the Skies saying?”

  “That’s the thing—they’re not saying anything. It’s like it never happened. Novak and Dax are setting up a new joint HQ for Cartaxus and the Skies. Everyone’s still working together. They say the plague is over. It’s been two days, and there haven’t been any new infections. They’re even talking about opening the bunkers up.”

  I press my hand to my forehead, swaying. This news is everything I’ve wanted to hear, but it doesn’t make any sense. Why would the Skies help Cartaxus after their drones blew Sunnyvale to hell? One of them must have set off the orange panels. Someone drove everyone crazy . . .

  But maybe it wasn’t either of them.

  My pulse slows to a crawl. Cartaxus and the Skies wouldn’t maintain their truce like this unless someone else was behind the orange panels. Someone they couldn’t fight alone. Someone capable of manipulating them, who could construct a plan that would plant malicious code into every panel on the planet.

  Someone like the great Dr. Lachlan Agatta.

  “It was my father,” I breathe. “Dax said an implant inside me added four million lines to the vaccine’s code, but that was what he wanted all along, isn’t it? That’s why he needed me to unlock it. He wanted to get that code into everyone’s arms without Cartaxus seeing it.” I cover my mouth. “Cole, I made them send it out to everyone.”

  “This isn’t your fault. Don’t think like that. This was Lachlan’s doing and his alone. Leoben and I think he has to be the one behind the attack on Sunnyvale.”

  The realization takes a moment to settle in. “You think he’s still alive.”

  It isn’t a question. I see the answer in Cole’s eyes, and the thought knocks the air from my lungs.

  “We don’t know for sure—”

  “But there’s a chance?”

  Cole nods. “There wasn’t much left after the explosion in his lab. I checked the report. They found a few traces of blood and tissue that matched his DNA. He could have been the one behind the hack that blew up the lab in the first place. It wouldn’t be easy, but Lachlan’s smart enough to leave tissue behind as a decoy.”