This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  “I still can’t remember anything properly,” I say. “It’s all bits and pieces, like I just don’t have a past anymore.”

  “What about your memories of boarding school?”

  “They’re even worse. They’re like . . . black-and-white photographs. I don’t know how I ever thought they were real.”

  “That’s how the brain works.” Cole looks out the window, scanning the trees. “If you suppress memories, it’ll build a story to take their place. I’ve had it done to me. I spent two weeks away from the lab, just after the outbreak, but I don’t know where. My black-out tech kicked in and stopped me from remembering. When I got back, Lachlan showed me photographs of me in Los Angeles. He said I’d been extracting a scientist from the city, getting them away from the riots. He told me what the weather was like, and what I’d eaten, and I started remembering it all.”

  “So were you really there?”

  “That’s the thing. I took one of the photographs and ran it through an image checker. It was faked. That didn’t stop me from remembering being there, though. Memories are weak. They’re fallible. That’s why I kept my scars.”

  My hand rises instinctively to my chest. The skin there is smooth and unscarred, and I have no memory of it looking like Cole’s. But in Jun Bei’s photograph, there is a network of stitches and puckered lines stretching all the way to her neck.

  Scars can be healed easily enough. Skin color can be altered. Hair, facial structure, eye color can all be changed with enough time. But there shouldn’t be a way to edit what’s inside my cells.

  I pick my file up from the pile on the floor and flip it open, scanning the contents, itching for a genkit cable to jack into my arm. I could figure this out so much faster if I could do my own analysis. The sequencing reports in the moldy file are in a format I’m not familiar with, and some of the experimental results are so bizarre that I can barely understand what Lachlan was testing for, but there’s something here that just might explain what he did to me.

  “What do you see?” Cole asks.

  I flip back through the pages, chewing my thumbnail. “I think I might know why I survived the decryption. It looks like my cells are flexible, but I don’t know how. Most people’s cells can’t handle changes to the natural DNA inside them. They reject it, which tends to destroy the cells, too. But it seems like my cells just . . . adapt. They change to suit whatever DNA is inside them, but I don’t know how.”

  “Does that mean you could change your body back?”

  Cole’s words hang in the air. I’ve been asking myself the same thing for the last few hours, but it feels strange to hear it asked aloud. I wear Lachlan’s face and skin, I have his eyes and hairline. His genes are written in the shape of my nose and the taper of my chin. But it’s not just his face anymore—it’s mine. It’s the face I’ve seen in the mirror for the last three years. Through the outbreak, through the desperate winters alone in the cabin. My eyes are so like Lachlan’s, but they also belong to me. The fire in them, the strength of my jaw, the tangles of my hair.

  When I look at Jun Bei’s photograph, I still feel like I’m looking at her instead of me.

  The thought of wearing Lachlan’s face is sickening, but the thought of having to change myself again is traumatizing too. I don’t know how I want to look. I don’t even know who I am.

  “I . . . I don’t know,” I say quietly.

  “I’m sorry,” Cole says. “I shouldn’t have asked that. It doesn’t matter what you look like.”

  But it does. He’s right—it’s part of who I am. The way a person looks is based on their DNA, and Lachlan changed mine. My chest tightens. “I’m not Jun Bei, Cole, not according to what’s inside me. I’m someone else, but I don’t know who. I don’t know anything anymore.”

  His hand slides up my back to rest on my good shoulder. “We’ll figure it out together.”

  I nod silently. I feel like I’m drowning, like I’m slipping into a cold, dark sea. Cole’s hand on my skin is a life raft, keeping me above the surface, but it’s not enough. I need to find something inside myself. A flame of bravery.

  I turn my gaze inward, but all I see is shadow.

  The jeep slows. Cole’s eyes glaze, and he pulls off the road and onto a heavily overgrown trail. “We’re close to the lab,” he says. “It’s just another few miles. Lee went to check it out on foot overnight, but he’s got stealth tech running, so I can’t hear him.”

  We bounce over rocks and fallen branches until we pull up beside Leoben’s jeep, parked in a thicket of trees.

  Cole climbs out, his eyes still glazed. He motions for me to stay, but I’m already halfway out of the jeep. I slide heavily to my feet, wincing as pain flickers in my still-wounded knee.

  Overhead, the pigeons are circling, their cries as deafening as hail on a roof, but I still manage to catch a low whistle cutting the air. Three sharp notes that yank at my memory. My head snaps up, scanning the trees. That’s the signal we used as children, when we called to one another. I know the reply—a two-note echo. I whistle it without thinking, and somebody behind me lets out a gasp.

  I spin around to see Leoben stepping out of the forest, carrying a rifle and a mud-smeared backpack. Dirt and ash are caked into the lines of his face. His shirt is torn open, revealing the scars and thick black tattoos covering his chest. His arms are scratched and bandaged, crisscrossed with smears of dried blood. When his brown eyes meet mine, they hold me frozen in place.

  He still doesn’t trust me. I have the face of the man who tortured him, who cut him open to see what he looked like on the inside. He said there was nothing so dangerous as an Agatta’s best intentions.

  But I am no Agatta.

  “Lee,” I breathe. Fresh memories rise like tiny fireworks, crackling inside my mind. I see Leoben, small and skinny, playing a game in the hallway. I feel him huddled with me, shaking with pain. I see him screaming and running from the nurses, a trail of blood behind him, a shard of broken glass clutched in one small fist.

  He’s my friend, my brother. We’ve known each other since we were babies. How could I not have seen it before?

  Leoben narrows his eyes, but as I hold his gaze, his expression drops into disbelief. He looks back into the jeep, where the folders are scattered on the floor. “No . . . ,” he says, backing away. “No, it’s not possible.”

  “It is,” Cole says. “It’s her, Lee. It’s Jun Bei.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “Lee,” I say again, staring at the tattoos that cover his arms. Suddenly I can read the story etched into his skin.

  An eagle, bear, wolf, scorpion, and mountain lion trace their way across his arms, one animal for each of the Zarathustra children. Mine is the little mountain lion—small but fierce—and its story ends in a circle tattooed on Leoben’s chest.

  “You put Jun Bei over your heart,” I whisper.

  “Of course I did,” he says. “She was my sister.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I murmur, reaching out to brush the ink-stained skin with my fingers. “But I must have told you a hundred times, Lee. Mountain lions don’t have spots.”

  My words hang in the air for a moment, and then the wind is knocked from my lungs as Leoben slams into me, lifting me from my feet. His arms crush my sides, his face pressed into my hair as he spins me through the air.

  “Ow!” I say, laughing. “Lee, my shoulder.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He puts me down but keeps his hands locked on my arms, shaking me as if he’s trying to convince himself that I’m real. “I still can’t believe it. Jesus, why did he do this to you?”

  I touch his face, his chest, his scars. The affection I feel for him is like a light inside me blinking on. “I don’t know why he did any of this, Lee. I can’t remember.”

  He swallows, pressing my hand to his heart, tears filling his eyes. He looks between me and Cole. “Then let’s go and ask him.” His voice trembles. “I picked up a heartbeat in the lab. I can’t wait any longer
. I want him dead.”

  CHAPTER 45

  “NIGHTSTICK COULD WORK,” COLE SAYS. “One of us sets it off, and the other comes in blazing.”

  Leoben shakes his head. “He’ll be ready for code. We need to come in with steel.”

  The two of them are in the front of Leoben’s jeep, with Cole’s following behind on its own. I’m sitting in the back, listening to them make plans, a black holster around my waist and a handgun at my side. We’re going to face Lachlan in the lab. We talked about calling Cartaxus or the Skies, or sending in a fleet of drones, but decided it was too dangerous. Lachlan’s too smart for that. He’ll be watching every blip of communication, waiting for any hint of an attack. If he feels threatened, he can turn on the orange panels anywhere in the world, just like he did in Sunnyvale.

  He has the whole world hostage. We don’t have a choice. We have to convince him to let us get close to him, and then we have to kill him.

  The thought is like the shadow of a hurricane on the horizon. I know it’s coming, but I can still turn my eyes away. I can pretend for just a few minutes longer that we’re not planning the murder of the man I called Father until a few hours ago.

  If I let myself think about it too long, I might lose the nerve to follow through on the plan I’m formulating.

  Cole and Leoben keep talking as we drive, speaking in military shorthand, noting firing angles, guns, traps, and contingencies. Their anger ripples in the air like heat, growing more focused by the second. It’s something to behold, seeing them work together. Two majestic, crafted weapons thrumming with power, planning an assault I know they’ll execute with surgical precision.

  At least they would be able to execute it, if it wasn’t an attack on Lachlan Agatta.

  I stare through the jeep’s rear windows at the three-peaked mountains in the distance. If Lachlan is in the lab we’re driving to, that means he’s been here all along. This is where he told us to go in the note he left in Cole’s panel, and I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Novak hadn’t forced us to go to Sunnyvale.

  Would we have driven here and found him waiting? Would he have told me the truth about my past?

  Somehow, I don’t think so. Lachlan’s plan is more complex than that. I still don’t know what his endgame is, but I think he wanted everything to happen exactly as it did.

  While we were at Sunnyvale, Novak said she’d received an anonymous tip-off—that I would be traveling across the country with the vaccine. At the time I thought it was Agnes, but she wouldn’t have known where we were going. It could have been Dax or Leoben, but something tells me it wasn’t.

  That leaves Lachlan.

  I’m starting to think he wanted us to end up at Sunnyvale. He wanted Novak in charge, unable to stop herself from broadcasting the decryption live and rushing the vaccine’s testing. He wanted me in a vat with a cable in my spine, and my body acting as a conduit for the four million lines of his daemon code.

  If that’s true, then the whole plan is brilliant, and he’s played us like a song. I shouldn’t expect anything else from a man like Lachlan, and that’s why I’m terrified.

  Because if he’s planned everything that’s happened until now, that means he’s still in control.

  A light rain starts to fall, echoed by a roll of thunder. Cole turns around in his seat to look back at me. “You ready for this? We’re going to drive straight up to the lab and go in there unarmed. The more normal we act, the closer he’ll let us get.”

  “Yeah, that sounds smart,” I say, still looking out the window, fiddling nervously with the zipper of one of the bags beside me. Both Leoben’s and Dax’s sleeping bags and gear are still piled in the jeep from when they were traveling together.

  “You don’t even need to come in with us,” Cole says.

  That makes me look up. “Are you kidding? I have more reason than anyone to want to see him dead.”

  Leoben grins. “Told you she wouldn’t like that.”

  Cole’s brow tightens. “I’m just saying, it isn’t going to be safe. There could be traps. He might have weapons we have no defenses for.” He nods at my arm, where a handful of cobalt dots are glowing from beneath the bruised skin of my wrist. My new panel is starting to initialize, but only a few apps have finished installing. “Are any of your other apps working yet?”

  I look down. “No, but there’s a rough interface. The healing and VR modules should be starting soon.” I blink, summoning a few lines of black text into my vision, reading the scrolling log of installation messages. Within an hour, maybe two, I’ll be able to use a full VR interface, to code without a keyboard, to plunge myself into VR worlds. And soon, according to the text in my vision, I’ll be able to access all the data Dax found backed up inside my spine.

  Those terabytes of data aren’t backups from my genkit. The dates I see scrolling across my vision are from years ago. The names and file types are clear—these are personal files. I’m still carrying everything that Jun Bei once kept stored inside her arm.

  Every scrap of code. Every stored recording. Lachlan didn’t wipe it when he changed my DNA. He left it all in there, waiting to be found. Jun Bei’s life, stored in comms and documents, is still locked inside me.

  Cole doesn’t know about that yet.

  If I tell him, he might realize what it means. He might think it through and see the full scale of Lachlan’s plan, the same way I’ve been seeing it since we started driving. He would see that we’re still just chess pieces being pushed around a board.

  If Cole knew what I was planning to do once we get to the lab, he would leave me behind.

  Leoben veers us off the road and along a muddy driveway that rolls down a hill and through a winding creek. A single memory flutters through my mind—the chill of water splashing up my legs as I run in the dark—but it’s lost as we pull through a patch of trees and into a grassy field.

  The breath rushes from my lungs. The lab looms before us—a square, three-story building jutting from overgrown grass. The whitewashed concrete walls are stained with rust and mold, and the flat concrete roof is lined with cracks that have sprouted weeds. The windows are broken, most of them covered with iron bars, and there’s a peeling Cartaxus logo painted above the door.

  I wrap my arms around myself, staring at it. Vague memories filter back—of dimly lit hallways, wooden bunks, and scratchy gray blankets. Of laser scanners, dead bolts, and snarling, genehacked dogs.

  This is a place of nightmares.

  “Home sweet home,” Leoben mutters. He pulls the jeep up on the gravel remains of a parking lot and kills the engine. Behind us, Cole’s empty jeep trundles across the grass and circles around to the other side of the lab to form a two-point perimeter.

  “There’s one person in the back of the lab,” Leoben says. “I’m pretty sure it’s him. He’s badly wounded, from what I can tell. He’s having trouble breathing. There’s a shitload of satellite data beaming up from here. I think this is where he’s controlling the crazy-people code from.”

  “So how do we block it?” I ask. “He could turn it on the moment we get inside.”

  “That’s my job,” Leoben says. “You two are going in on your own at first. I’ll stay out here and use the black-dome chips in the jeeps to block his connection. He’ll be cycling his frequency, and the jeeps suck at matching it. I’ll help them out, but I need to maintain physical contact. I think I can hide the fact that I’m blocking him for five minutes, maybe ten, but eventually he’ll figure it out, and once he does, I won’t be able to stop him. You need to get in there and blow whatever he’s using to control the code—could be a server bank, could be a bunch of genkits, which is kind of Lachlan’s style. Once you disable the connection from inside, I’ll come in and we’ll deal with the old man himself.”

  “Can Cole stay out here and block the connection instead?” I ask.

  “Negative,” Leoben says. “Cole sucks at this stuff even more than the jeep. You and I were the only ones with any real
skills.”

  Cole turns to me. “Why do you want me to stay outside?”

  “Because I think he’s going to use you against me somehow. He could have killed me during the procedure, but he didn’t. He could have run away, but he’s still here. He left a backup of my old panel inside me, even though he must have known I’d find it in the decryption.”

  “You think he wanted you to remember?” Cole asks.

  “Of course he did,” I say. “Why else would he have sent you to find me? This is all part of his plan.”

  Leoben snorts. “It’s a stupid plan, then. He’s going to get himself well and truly murdered.”

  “No,” I say, “it’s a genius plan. I still don’t know what Lachlan is trying to do, but I’m almost certain that he needs my help. I think Sunnyvale was some kind of test to see if he could control people with the vaccine. That’s why he didn’t activate the orange panels in everyone. But his plan will be bigger than that—Lachlan didn’t do this to drive everyone crazy. You think you’re in control right now, but we’re all still pieces on his board, and he’s moving us around. Whatever his real goal is, he’s been waiting for us to get here, and I’m pretty sure it’s because he needs my help.”

  “But there’s no way you’ll help him now,” Cole says. “Not after what he did to you.”

  “I don’t want to help him, but I might not have a choice.”

  “But he has no leverage, not once we block his connection. He can’t make you do anything.”

  “Don’t you see?” I whisper. “He’s made me remember you. Your body is full of his code—I saw that when I hacked your panel. I’ve seen it every time your eyes go black. If you walk in there with me, he’s going to find a way to hurt you, I know it. Then I’ll do whatever he says. He made me remember my past so that he can use my feelings for you to control me. That gives him all the leverage he needs.”