This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  Lachlan reaches out a hand to me, his skin blistered and weeping. “It was important that you saw just how dark we are inside. That’s why I had to do it. You had to see it up close, with your own eyes, or you wouldn’t understand what I’m trying to do. I need you to help me, Catarina, like you promised years ago. I isolated the instinct and used the vaccine to suppress it, but the effect is temporary. With your help, and with your gift, we can make it permanent.”

  Permanent. I close my eyes, my head spinning. He wants to change the DNA of everyone on the planet the same way he changed mine. Recode their underlying genes. The idea is terrifying—but only because it’s coming from a man who wants to force it on the world. I’ve seen the Wrath, I’ve felt it, and I’ll always carry the shame of what it made me do. The immunity. The thrill I felt after taking it. If I had a choice, I would have done anything to stop myself from turning into that beast.

  And I wouldn’t be the only one.

  “So why don’t you just tell people about this?” I ask. “Nobody wants this inside them. Not after Hydra, and what it’s done to us. We could decide as a species to stop this, to cut it off with this generation. You already grew a line of plague children inside vats—why didn’t you come up with a way for people to choose this for their children?”

  Lachlan closes his eyes, sighing. The sound is rough; his throat is burned. “Don’t you think I’ve tried, Catarina? I must have tried a thousand times. The human genome is a perfectly balanced equation with so many terms that we still don’t understand. You can’t simply pluck a gene from it and expect the result to remain stable. That’s why gentech can’t change your natural DNA. The core of what makes us human is constant and immutable. I tried growing specimens with the gene for the Wrath removed, but their brains never grew properly. One day future scientists will learn how to cleanly slice that part of us away, but for now we rely on you.”

  Something inside me trembles. I brace myself against the wall, staring into Lachlan’s eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  “My research with Cole showed me the patterns of our instincts within our genes, and his gift gave me a method of activating or suppressing them. But you operate at a level beyond that. You are the code that writes itself. Your body can take in noise and turn it into a symphony. Your DNA rebalances the equation of humanity in a way I have yet to comprehend. If you join me, Catarina, if we work together on this, we can reproduce your gift and share it with the world.”

  “I know you want to change them,” I whisper. “You want to rewrite their DNA like you rewrote mine. But I don’t understand—what does that have to do with instincts?”

  He smiles. “You’re not seeing the true beauty of your talents, Catarina. When you accept a change to your DNA, it’s not just your body that recodes itself. Your mind opens like a flower, mimicking the personality of the person whose DNA you’re taking in. Your brain restructures itself with an ease it would have taken us centuries to develop. You can take on the personality, and the strengths, of anyone you choose.”

  “My . . . my brain?” Ice settles inside me. “What do you mean?”

  Lachlan chuckles. “You were always bright, darling, even when you were little. Solving puzzles faster than the others, always remembering what you were told. But the treatments started early. Much of your intelligence came from me. It’s not just my face you wear, Catarina. I gave you my mind, as well.”

  CHAPTER 47

  “NO,” I BREATHE. A CRACK inside my mind grows wide, splintering the last of my hope, the last vestige of my self-control.

  Not my mind. My body, I can handle. This is just skin and bone and flesh. Impermanent.

  He cannot have my mind.

  “Don’t you think like me sometimes?” Lachlan asks. “Don’t you read my code as if you were the one who wrote it, darling?”

  My stomach twists. I lurch to the side, gagging. He built his mind over mine. He took everything I am.

  Now he wants to do it to everyone else.

  Rage blazes through me like a flame along a fuse. Through tears I see the handgun I dropped, lying just out of my reach. I hurl myself toward it, grasping for its barrel, but my hand slips in the pool of my blood and my knee smacks into the tiles. The pain tears a ragged scream from me. My body curls in on itself instinctively.

  “There it is!” Lachlan shouts. “The Wrath, Catarina! I can see it in you as clear as day.”

  I suck in a breath, trying to drag myself to the gun. He’s damn right this is the Wrath—I’m summoning it with all the strength I have. The beast is howling, rising through me, painting my vision red, and I’m calling it to me, begging it to take over again.

  He needs to die. He’s murdered me; there is no other word for what he’s done. He’s ripped away every shred of the person I used to be.

  My hands lock on the barrel, dragging it across the tiles, and I lift it, flipping it into my palm, my finger curling around the trigger.

  “What would Cole think if he could see you now?”

  I stop, the gun aimed at Lachlan’s heart. My eyes slide to the window, and I see my reflection overlaid across the mountains, my face twisted in rage.

  My breath catches. I’ve never seen myself this way, never dared to look into a mirror after yielding to the Wrath. The girl in the window is not someone I know, but there is an echo in her eyes of the child I’m only just beginning to remember.

  The girl who plunged scissors into a nurse’s throat. Who killed fourteen guards to escape from the laboratory she spent her childhood in. She wouldn’t hesitate; she’d pound bullets into Lachlan’s chest until the magazine ran out.

  But I’m not her anymore.

  I scrunch my eyes shut, letting out a scream of frustration. My finger slides away from the trigger. The Wrath raging inside me wants to shoot Lachlan now, but I can’t let myself yield to it. I can’t kill Lachlan in a fit of rage, and I can’t do it for revenge. I want to be the girl Cole watched with wonder in his eyes. The one smiling from his sketchbook.

  In his eyes, I am fierce, but I am not a murderer.

  I throw the handgun down, my chest shuddering with adrenaline. “I won’t kill you, but I won’t help you with this plan. You have to stop this madness. People have the right to make up their own minds. You can’t decide for them.”

  “You’re defending the Wrath, Catarina! I’m only taking away a part of us we should have bred out long ago. It’s an artifact from when the people who survived were the ones who killed everyone else. We relied on that instinct then, but we don’t need it anymore. It’s holding us back, keeping us from our true potential. What did you see in Sunnyvale that was worth saving?”

  I close my eyes and see Dax’s hands on my neck. The dark gleam in his eyes after he shot me in the back. Sunnyvale was a mass of bloodthirsty animals. There was nothing there I can defend. Not a single thing worth saving.

  But that doesn’t mean I’m willing to lobotomize the entire human race.

  “This choice isn’t up to you. It’s up to all of us.” I grit my teeth, trying to sit up straighter. “I saw Dax drag himself back from the Wrath when he saw what he’d done to me. If he was strong enough to fight your code, then we’re strong enough to fight the instinct. We can overcome it on our own.”

  Lachlan shakes his head. A jerking, pained motion. “As long as the Wrath remains, humanity will never truly be free of it. It will sit at the back of our minds like a sickness, leaching into every choice, every action. It has always controlled us, and it always will. There is a chasm that lies between the savage idiocy of animals and humanity’s true potential, Catarina. Civilization has built us a bridge that lies stretched across that chasm, but the Wrath is stopping us from crossing over it. We cannot evolve without shedding our past. We are a flawed beast, and we cannot move forward until we cut this weakness from ourselves. You can’t seriously argue for keeping evil inside us, darling. That is madness.”

  “No,” I say, pushing myself up. My bloody hands slip on the tiles,
but I manage to grab the edge of the closest genkit and haul myself up. “I’m not arguing for evil—I’m arguing for discussion. People need to see your work, and then maybe they’ll choose to do this on their own.”

  He snorts. “They’ll never make the right choice. I spent years trying to convince Cartaxus to take this seriously, but they never saw the value in my work. We can’t leave it up to people to decide this for themselves. You don’t ask the patients to tend to the sick. This is the only way to save us.”

  “You’re insane.” I sway, gripping the genkit to steady myself. My wounded knee is pulsing with pain. “You’ve lost track of what’s right and wrong. I’m not going to help you with this.”

  “You think it’s up to you?” Lachlan’s gaze grows steely. “You’ll help me, Catarina, or I’ll switch the suppressor into reverse somewhere else. How about Homestake?”

  “You can’t do that. We blocked your connection.”

  “That’s interesting, because I just did it. It should take another minute before Homestake’s eighty thousand civilians start killing each other.”

  My blood freezes. As if on cue, Leoben’s voice echoes through the hallway, shouting that the black-dome chips aren’t working anymore.

  “Eighty thousand lives,” Lachlan says. “They’re in your hands, my darling girl. Say you’ll join me, and they can all be spared.”

  I stare around wildly. My eyes snap to the gun, but I don’t know if shooting Lachlan will save Homestake’s civilians. I turn to the humming, industrial-grade genkit I’m gripping for balance. Its wireless light glows a clear, solid blue. He must be using it to control the vaccine. If I want to save Homestake, there’s only one option.

  I’m going to have to fight his code.

  I look down at my arm. My panel hasn’t finished growing, but a handful of cobalt lights are blinking beneath my skin. This probably won’t work, but it’s the only weapon I have left to fight with. I grab one of the needle-tipped cables hanging from the genkit’s cable port and jam it into my wrist.

  The moment the cable snakes under my skin, my vision blinks to blue, and I tumble head over heels into the first VR session I can remember. Text and images batter my mind, racing across my vision, though I can still make out the vague outline of Lachlan’s silhouette.

  “What are you doing, Catarina?”

  I ignore him, trying to orient myself in the VR interface, fumbling desperately in the mess of menu items. It’s hopeless. I need a keyboard. The VR chip in my arm is newly grown; it hasn’t yet learned to read my thoughts. It’ll be weeks until it can understand the commands I send to it and make sense of the impulses my brain generates.

  But that’s not entirely true.

  This panel is grown from the backup of the one Jun Bei carried, so I still have every file and setting she stored in it. Lachlan may have rewritten my mind, but I still have memories of Jun Bei. There is still some flicker left in me of the girl I used to be. If I can drag back a glimpse of her, just for a moment, I might be able to control my panel enough to launch an attack.

  I close my eyes, ignoring the wash of text and color the VR interface throws at me, trying to zero in on my strongest memories. Leoben’s smile. Ziana singing in the trees. Anna laughing at the impressions of the nurses that Leoben used to do. Cole’s face in the moonlight the first time he kissed me. The night he swore to me that we would always be together.

  Something prickles in the base of my skull, and the edges of the VR interface ripple into focus. It’s working. I grasp desperately at more memories, urging them back to me, trying to bond with the girl inside me, with who I used to be.

  I see Cole standing beside me, staring out at the mountains through the barred windows of our room, our hands linked together. We were so young and broken, and he was the only thing that could take my pain away. We saw the darkest parts of each other, and we faced them together. He was the brightest light in my life, and I threw myself into him the way someone would hurl herself off a cliff.

  Something stirs within me. A presence. A whisper. A keyhole into a dark and hidden part of me. I reach for it, grasping, urging it back to me, and the VR session snaps into focus. Cole’s face fades from my memory, but something deeper takes its place.

  I hear a voice rising inside my mind that is not my own.

  Her words are clipped and sharp. She speaks the way a rifle fires. She is steel and glass and blood fused into a blade. This panel in my arm is her universe. She knows every line of every file.

  I open my eyes and let Jun Bei sweep back into me.

  The genkit’s mainframe unfolds before me, sparklingly clear. Files and commands, links and directories sprawled in a virtual map. A firewall pops up as I tilt myself into it, but I’ve faced firewalls before, and I have an arsenal of viruses waiting inside my arm. My fingers twitch, my instincts urging me to type a string of commands, but I don’t need to code that way anymore. I can work like Dax does, jacked straight into the heart of the machine. I tilt my head back, my consciousness sliding into my panel, searching for something I can use.

  “You can’t fight this, Catarina.”

  Lachlan’s voice is distant, inconsequential. I ignore him. A dozen files rise before me, forming a wall in my vision. A glance at each is enough to bring its meaning back to me, and I pick and choose between them, selecting loops and subfunctions. Lines of code unfurl like smoke billowing from a fire. A single thought brings blocks of logic spinning together, then coalescing and stretching out into infinite virtual space.

  A new virus of fresh, devastating code snaps together in my mind, and I wield it like a knife, stabbing it into the genkit’s heart.

  The firewall crumbles. It’s almost too easy. Lachlan has been holding me back all this time. The hypergenesis wasn’t just to stop me from studying my DNA, it was to stop me from turning into this. The girl I used to be. A mind too sharp, too powerful for him to control. He gave me his intelligence, sure enough.

  It’s the biggest mistake he ever made.

  The genkit’s defenses peel back like blistering layers of paint, revealing the pure, structured programming at the heart of the machine. Lines of code blink into view like strands in a multidimensional spiderweb that stretches out in every direction as far as I can see. Some are black, others white, some are silver and yellow, each running a different task in the genkit’s memory. A pulsing strand in the distance is a lurid, blazing orange, and I know instantly that it’s the strand I need to break.

  It’s a satellite connection linking Lachlan to the tower at Homestake, and it’s pulsing with a constant stream of information. I angle my consciousness closer, skipping through memory banks like a stone across a lake.

  “What are you doing?” Lachlan shouts, his voice half-lost in the wave of code I’m riding.

  “I’m fighting you,” I whisper.

  I trace the strand to a communications port and send every attack, every scrap of malicious code I can remember into its base. Electric shocks. Logic bombs. Every line in the stockpile of weapons I’ve been developing ever since I was a child. “You gave me your mind,” I say as the connection frays and hisses. “Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “You won’t stop it, Catarina.” Lachlan’s voice is far too calm. “The connection is linked to the machine’s core. Breaking it will trip the self-destruct.”

  I pause. He’s right. Buried at the base of the glowing orange strand is a web of white that’s wound into the genkit’s power unit. Severing the connection will set off the self-destruct sequence—the same trigger I set off in Homestake, only this machine is a hundred times more powerful. Its blast will take out half the room. I won’t be able to run, not with my wounded leg.

  It’ll kill us both within the space of a heartbeat.

  Cole’s face flashes into my mind. I just got him back. I have a life and a future. I don’t want to die, but deep down I know what I have to do.

  “You think we’re animals,” I say, throwing my consciousness harder int
o the genkit’s architecture. “You think we’re controlled by our instincts, that we’re just the sum of our genes. But you’re wrong. I’ve faced death, and I’m not afraid anymore. I’m ready to die to stop you.”

  I blink back into the room as the connection snaps, severing the link to Homestake. Lachlan’s bloodshot eyes lock on mine, full of something that looks strangely like pride.

  “I’m sorry, Father,” I breathe as the door to the hallway flies open and the bank of genkits on the wall explodes.

  CHAPTER 48

  IT TAKES SIX HEALING TECH syringes to stop the blood pulsing from Cole’s back after he threw his body over me when the genkits exploded. His back shredded down to his titanium-latticed ribs, and the skin on my hands is sliced to ribbons as I haul shards of glass and metal from his flesh. Leoben forces bags of saline, then finally bags of his own blood, into Cole’s veins.

  Cole’s heart stops twice. After an hour it grows steady, and Leoben and I stare at each other across the silver-tinted flesh of Cole’s back.

  We’re blood-drenched and shaking. Pale and exhausted.

  Brother and sister.

  Alive.

  We didn’t have time to save Lachlan. His corpse sits slumped in the dentist’s chair, his body riddled with shrapnel. While I was resuscitating Cole, I saw the light fade from Lachlan’s eyes and heard him take his final breath.

  It almost looked like he was smiling.

  When Cole is ready, we carry him outside for no reason other than wanting to get out of the prison we spent our childhoods in. Leoben and I drag logs and sticks from the forest to build a fire together, and lay Cole beside it to keep him warm. I stretch out next to him until his vitals stabilize and his internal tech takes over.

  Hours later, the sun dips below the horizon as the night’s first stars blink into an azure sky. Cole breathes steadily, still asleep on a roll-out mattress on the ground, his face bathed in the light from low flames dancing up from the fire. His back is a mess of silver streaks, more nanomesh than flesh, but I don’t care. I just want him to heal.