This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  Cole stares at me, his brow pinched. There are shadows around his eyes, and his cheeks are hollow. He looks weaker and more exhausted than he did when he was shot. I can’t bear the thought of losing him again. I won’t watch him get hurt. He’s spent every minute since he arrived protecting me, and now it’s my turn.

  He stiffens as he realizes what it is I’m planning. “No, you’re not going in there alone, absolutely not.”

  “You have to let me do this.”

  “There’s no way in hell.” Cole’s eyes blaze. “I just got you back. I won’t risk losing you again.”

  “It’s not up to you.”

  Cole freezes. He can read it in my face before I say it, and he throws his hands out, reaching for my mouth.

  But he’s too late.

  “Recumbentibus.”

  The word hits him like a bullet. He slumps, coughing, then falls back in his seat.

  “Jesus,” Leoben says. “What the hell did you just do?”

  I crawl to the back of the jeep and push open the rear doors. “I knocked him out. He’ll be down for fifteen minutes. I’m going in there alone—don’t try to follow me. Wait out here and block his connection.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Leoben says, stunned. “Welcome back, Jun Bei.”

  I nod, turning to stride to the lab, not sure how I feel about hearing that.

  The steel door set into the front of the lab is unlocked. I push it open to a shadowed waiting room I’d expect to find in a doctor’s office. Dust-covered chairs are arranged beside an empty reception desk, with the Cartaxus antlers printed on a sign behind it. Triangular lights on the ceiling blink to life the moment I step inside, creating a glowing path leading to a hallway across the room.

  Lachlan knows I’m here. Of course he does. He’s probably been tracking our movements all the way from Sunnyvale. The lights pulse, urging me to follow them. Lachlan is guiding me through the lab.

  “Okay, then,” I mutter. “I’ll come to you.”

  I let the door swing shut behind me and limp down the hallway. The overhead lights flicker as I walk, guiding me past dusty rooms that tug at my memory. I’ve run down this hallway before, and I’ve been dragged down it by my hair, kicking and screaming, with wires in my arm.

  The lights stop at an unmarked door, but even without them, somehow I know this is where I need to go. I can feel it, deep down. An itch in the base of my skull. I grit my teeth and turn the handle.

  The door swings open to reveal the gleaming laboratory I’ve seen so many times before. The room from my dreams, and the flashes during the decryption. The tiled floor and wall of glass looking out at the three mountain peaks. They loom beyond the window, shrouded in mist.

  Lachlan sits across the room, watching me with a smile.

  “Hello, darling,” he says. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  I freeze. I’ve been preparing myself to see him for the last two hours, but the sight of him still takes me by surprise. He’s badly wounded. The skin on his face is scabbed and raw, and he’s sitting back in a mechanical chair that looks like it belongs in a dentist’s office. One hand is bandaged; the other is a blistered mess. His wrists and neck are wrapped in layers of blood-spotted gauze.

  But it’s him. Lachlan. The man I once called Father. Meeting his gaze brings back a flood of jumbled memories. I see our days together in the cabin mixed up with the years spent as a prisoner in this nightmare of a lab.

  I was his experimental subject. His victim.

  But for the past three years I was his daughter, too.

  “It’s really you,” I say, stepping into the doorway. Lachlan’s bloodshot eyes drop to the handgun at my side. Something attached to the door starts humming.

  I look down just in time to see two electromagnets tear the socket out of my wounded knee.

  CHAPTER 46

  I FALL TO THE FLOOR, letting out a scream as twin arcs of pain burn through my legs. Blood splashes the tiles. My lungs contract and lock like fists, sending me sliding to my side.

  My right knee seems intact. It was farther from the door when the magnets turned on.

  My left knee, the one I destroyed at Homestake, wasn’t nearly so lucky.

  The black fabric of my pants is torn open, revealing a gaping wound in the flesh of my left leg. It stretches from mid-thigh down to my calf, exposing dark muscle, beating veins, and the white glint of bone.

  Lachlan put electromagnets inside the door. That’s my trap, my own goddamn trap. How the hell did he know?

  The handgun at my side is gone, ripped from its holster by the magnets. It bounces off the door frame and skids across the tiles, coming to a stop just out of my reach. The metal socket from my left knee is embedded in the side of the doorway, and the end of the gold-flecked cable that ran down my leg hangs from the wound. It flips about on the tiles, broken and sparking, trying to reach the socket again.

  “Use your belt, quickly.”

  I look up, woozy. Lachlan sits motionless in the chair, watching impassively as my blood forms a dark, gleaming pool on the tiles.

  “You’re going to need to cinch your thigh, or you’ll bleed out. That’s an artery, darling. You’d better hurry. You’ll be unconscious soon.”

  I yank my belt off with blood-soaked fingers, fumbling as I wrap it around my thigh.

  “Tight, now.”

  I gasp, wrenching the belt tight, gritting my teeth against the pain.

  “That’s good. I’m sorry to have to hurt you, Catarina, but I wanted to make sure we had time to talk before you try to kill me.”

  I tie the belt off, holding the end to keep it tight, but the wound is still pulsing with thick, hot blood. The tissue in my knee is new and fragile after I hurt it at Homestake. The magnet ripped it open like a knife slicing through fruit. I grit my teeth, yanking the belt tighter. “I’m not going to have much time to talk if I keep bleeding like this.”

  Lachlan watches me for a moment, then nods. A steel drawer beside me shoots open with a hiss of refrigerated air, revealing a row of silver syringes.

  “Healing tech,” he says. “Straight into the wound, that’s the fastest way. It’s the latest generation. I designed it myself.”

  I pick up a syringe, biting my lip. I don’t trust Lachlan, not by a long shot, but the puddle of blood around me is growing by the second. The bleeding shows no sign of stopping. I can feel my blood pressure dropping. I don’t have any choice but to do what he says.

  I drive the needle into my shredded flesh, scrunching my eyes shut.

  “That’s my girl,” he says. “Well done.”

  Almost instantly, the pain ebbs away. I drop the blood-smeared syringe on the floor, gasping with relief. The blood flowing from the wound slows, then turns into a trickle. I shift my weight, pushing myself up shakily until I’m sitting against the wall, my leg splayed out in front of me.

  Lachlan watches me, his expression still impassive and unreadable. Part of me is flung back to when Cole first told me he was dead. I cried for this man. I loved him. Maybe part of me still does. That would explain the tightness in my throat, the pounding of my heart. I came here today with a gun and every intention of using it, but sitting here now, looking into Lachlan’s eyes, I don’t know if I could.

  He coughs wetly. He looks seriously wounded. Bandages cover his ankles and feet, and what skin I can see on his hands and neck is blistered and scabbed.

  “You’re hurt too,” I say. “It looks like you could use one of these syringes.”

  His eyes drift down to his bandaged hand. “Unfortunately, that isn’t possible. I miscalculated the time I’d need to get out of the lab at Cartaxus when I blew it up. The genkits corrupted my panel when they detonated. I can’t risk using healing tech until my system is clear.”

  “That’s not like you. You’re normally so careful.”

  Lachlan shrugs, then winces at the movement. To my horror, part of me still aches to see him in pain.

  “Another hacker had already weaken
ed our systems,” he says, “and the genkit’s self-destruct sequence ran faster than I planned.”

  I blink, confused. Could he really not know the hacker was me? I consider telling him for a moment but change tack instead.

  “You faked my hypergenesis.”

  “Ah, yes. That was unfortunate. I had to stop you digging too deeply into your panel. You would have found too much too soon.”

  “What about my mother? Was she . . . was she even real?”

  A flicker passes across his face. A shadow of something deep and true. “She was very real, Catarina. I loved her very much, just as I love you. But she isn’t your mother, as I’m sure you’ve come to realize.”

  I just stare at him. I don’t need to answer. The anger in my eyes should be all the evidence he needs.

  “I assume you’d like to know how I changed your DNA.”

  I nod, gritting my teeth. The skin around the wound on my leg is starting to blister—but not like it’s falling apart. Like it’s melting back together.

  “How much do you remember about the Zarathustra program?” he asks.

  I gasp, arching my back as my leg shakes, my nerves aflame. Strings of wet, torn flesh are coalescing, stretching across the wound, slowly pulling the two edges back together.

  “N-not much,” I stutter, my vision blurring. “Except that you used knockout kids, and you were making a vaccine.”

  “Close, but not quite. You weren’t knockout kids. The genetic recoding that happened in the Zarathustra project was performed by nature herself. She transferred her gifts to you.”

  My head snaps up. He’s talking about gene transfer. When two species interact, sometimes they share their DNA. Humans carry genes from plants, bacteria, and even viruses that have made their way into our genome over the course of our evolution.

  My breath stills. “You used the virus.”

  Lachlan smiles. “Indeed. You and the others were grown in tanks in this lab and infected with Hydra when you were just a clump of cells. Most of the samples died instantly, but a handful of you survived. Your cells replicated so quickly that the virus couldn’t keep up. Its triggers were destroyed as your cells split and replicated, and parts of Hydra’s DNA intermingled with your own. It changed your cellular structure. It built and shaped your bodies. It’s true, you’re not my daughter. You’re the daughter of the plague.”

  The air stills. The sounds of my breathing and my beating heart shift up into some harsher frequency. The fog-covered mountains beyond the window shudder in my vision. It seems to shake the very foundations of the building, rattling my breath. But the ground is not shaking; I am.

  My identity is splintering like a ship thrust against stone cliffs. I feel the mast of myself snapping, my sails ripped to shreds. I knew I wasn’t normal. I knew my cells were changed and twisted—there is no other way I could have survived the vaccine’s decryption. I knew Lachlan changed me, broke me, forged me into something else, but I didn’t know just how unnatural I was.

  I’m not just abnormal. This is more than a genetic tweak. I was created, built, and rearranged by the virus.

  I’m not even quite human.

  “But I’ve seen my DNA,” I whisper. “It’s like yours. There’s nothing from Hydra in it.”

  “Oh, there is, you just can’t see it. Genkits run their scans on humanity’s forty-six chromosomes, with cursory checks for duplicates. They discard anything that looks like a contaminant, which means that your additional two chromosomes don’t show up on the average scan.”

  “I have forty-eight chromosomes?” My stomach lurches. I press my lips together, fighting the urge to be sick.

  “Don’t get too excited about it. Cole has fifty-four, and Ziana had sixty, but she was barely human at the best of times. Your additional chromosomes can’t be changed, but the forty-six I’ve worked on are incredibly flexible. You’re a chameleon, darling. The rest of us can mask small parts of ourselves, but you can literally become anything you want, recoding yourself from your very foundations.”

  Every word from Lachlan’s lips is another wave in the storm in my mind. I press my hands to the cold, tiled floor as though the contact will anchor me somehow.

  “That’s my gift, isn’t it? That’s what you were studying when you cut me open.”

  He nods—a short, jerking movement. “That research helped me develop the procedure you used to unlock the vaccine. It would have killed anyone else before it was done. That was why I needed your help, Catarina. I never wanted you to get hurt. I never wanted anyone to get hurt—that’s why I set this plan in motion. The vaccine is our last chance, and humanity’s survival depends on it. Everything I’ve done has been to ensure its release.”

  “But you don’t care about the vaccine! I talked to Cartaxus. They were going to pretend to withhold the code and let the Skies give it to everyone on the surface. That would have worked, and you know it. But all you cared about was putting whatever abomination you wrote into it. You know I was there at Sunnyvale. I saw the orange panels and what it did to those people. You murdered them. That had nothing to do with humanity’s survival.”

  “Oh, but it did,” Lachlan says, his voice rising. “You’re so focused on the virus, but Hydra isn’t our greatest threat. Why can’t you see that, darling? I’ve gone through so much to make you understand. Ever since the beginning, I’ve done this all for you. Sunnyvale was for you, Catarina.”

  His eyes are locked on mine, and my hands are pressed to the floor, but I am crashing against rocks, tossed high on furious waves. I close my eyes, seeing drones in the sky. Blood and broken bones. Orange panels glowing from the arms of snarling beasts.

  He did it all for me. The monster who is not my father. I’m the one who let him, who paved the way.

  It was all my fault.

  “But I don’t understand,” I say. “Sunnyvale was a nightmare. Dax almost killed me.”

  He just smiles. “There wasn’t a person in that town capable of killing you, darling. You might not remember your training, but I assure you it’s still there.”

  “Why?” I cry, my voice breaking. “Why did you make everyone go crazy?”

  “You can’t make people go crazy with gentech,” Lachlan says. “You know this, Catarina. Tell me how I could have controlled those people with a piece of code. Tell me how I could have made them kill each other. The human brain is too complex to be controlled like that. All you can do is encourage or suppress parts of us that are already there. That’s what Sunnyvale was for, darling. I needed you to see it for yourself.”

  I blink. The pain in my leg is still crippling, and my breathing is ragged, but my mind is growing clear. I’m beginning to see what he’s talking about—what he was trying to show me through the horror of Sunnyvale. It’s the same thing I’ve seen so many times over the last two years, but I’ve never put it together until now. I close my eyes, shuddering as it falls into place.

  The Lurkers. The hordes at Sunnyvale. The response to the virus’s scent.

  They’re all the same instinct, like different notes in the same chord.

  “Instincts,” I breathe. “That’s what you were doing with Cole. You were looking for where our instincts are coded in our DNA, and you found them.”

  He smiles. “That’s right. I found them all through Cole and mapped them out painstakingly in our genome. We like to think we’re complex creatures, that our higher-order thinking is what controls us, but in reality we’re mostly driven by our instincts. You see their ugly face in every scandal. Every act of war. We try to keep our instincts reined in, but it’s like blocking out the sun. They bleed into our lives, into the very fabric of society. I mapped out those instincts, Catarina, but I found one I couldn’t ignore. One little gene, deeply hidden, held inside each of us. It’s the quintessence of the rage you saw in Sunnyvale.”

  “The Wrath,” I whisper.

  “Yes, darling. The Wrath. So many of our violent behaviors can be traced back to that one little gene. The scent of
the infected doesn’t change people’s minds, it just switches on a part of them that’s been there all along. An ancient part of our reptilian brain, left over from when we were savages. I didn’t create the horror you saw in Sunnyvale. I just brought it to the surface.”

  I close my eyes, seeing the leaping fire and snarling hordes, seeing Sunnyvale’s streets erupting into bloodshed. But I’ve seen it for longer than that. I’ve felt it for years, heard its voice whispering to me, begging for release. The abyss. The darkness inside me that held the knife every time I killed a second-stager to survive. The beast. I can hear it now, lurking in my cells.

  A tiny core of evil, boiled down to a single gene.

  “When I found it, I knew we were saved,” Lachlan says. “Humanity could finally evolve into a superior race and leave our horrific past behind us. I tried to show Cartaxus, but they couldn’t see the bigger picture—that the virus wasn’t the real threat to our survival. It was the Wrath. It’s been controlling us since we were cavemen. We’ve had one war after another throughout our entire history, all because of this tiny, insignificant gene. We’re doomed if we keep going, whether we beat the virus or not. The only way to save humanity is to find a way to change.”

  “And that’s what you’re doing?” I ask. “With the vaccine, you’re . . . changing people’s genes? You’re trying to recode the human race?”

  “When you pick up an apple with a rotten spot, do you eat the spoiled flesh? No, you cut it out. Humanity has a spot, Catarina. It’s tiny, but it’s powerful, and it’s holding us back, keeping us bound by the obsolete instincts of our ancestors. We needed it once to survive, but we don’t need it anymore.”

  “Can you even hear yourself?” I gasp. “It’s not up to you to choose!”

  “The choice is obvious!” Lachlan’s eyes grow wide. “The human brain has barely evolved in fifty thousand years. It only takes a computer chip a decade to become obsolete, but we’re running on fifty-thousand-year-old hardware. Humanity needs to evolve or we will die.”

  “But you’re destroying people,” I say, my voice trembling. “You weren’t helping the people at Sunnyvale—you were tearing them apart.”