This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  Leoben waited for a while, then went off hunting. He said he needed to kill something, which part of me understands. We’ve just lost our father, in a way. We grew up as prisoners and subjects in his experiments, but Lachlan was also the man who raised us. My memories of my childhood are still scattered—broken moments and snatches of conversations drifting without context in my mind, but I know that part of me cared about him back then, despite everything he did. There is a void where his shadow once fell, and I don’t yet know how to rearrange my emotions to fill that space.

  Since Leoben left, I’ve sat for hours with my back against one of the jeep’s tires, staring into the flames, unsure if I’m numb or just overwhelmed. Part of me thinks that if I let myself feel anything at all, I’ll fall into a chasm inside myself and won’t be able to climb out. Or maybe I’ll be fine. Cold and dispassionate, like Lachlan. I don’t know which reaction would be worse.

  The fire crackles, and Cole’s hands twitch in his sleep. He shifts to his side, brushing against me, his skin warm and flushed. It takes all my strength not to pull his arms open and curl into his chest, to kiss the soft skin beneath his jaw where his stubble fades away. I still haven’t told him what Lachlan said to me. About changing my mind.

  I still don’t know how to feel about it myself.

  If Lachlan’s mind was written over mine, then maybe I’m no more than a copy. A butchered, mutant clone with one gender chromosome and a bunch of inhuman DNA separating me from him. I wear his skin; I share his personality—all that’s left from Jun Bei are the memories of a girl I barely know buzzing in the back of my mind. I don’t know if it’s enough to resurrect her, or if I’ve truly lost that version of myself.

  I don’t know which option frightens me more.

  I glimpsed enough of Jun Bei when I hacked the lab’s genkit to know that the pain of her childhood is what defined her. She took that pain inside herself and let it crystallize there, creeping into her heart until it glittered like ice. I thought Cole was a weapon made of steel, but he has softer places hidden inside. He is vulnerable, and gentle.

  Jun Bei is not.

  Her voice has faded from my mind, but I can still feel the power of it, the echo of her thoughts on the fringes of my mind. To remember her fully, and hear her voice like that again, would mean opening myself to the pain she carried. I don’t know if I can bear that. I don’t know if I want to.

  But when I think of the little mountain lion on Leoben’s chest, I feel a void inside me.

  A log in the fire pops, and Cole stirs, his hand brushing my ankle. “Hey there,” he says, blinking awake. He rubs his eyes, bleary. “Where’s Lee?”

  “Hunting,” I say. “Don’t get up. I’m keeping watch. He wanted to let off steam by shooting things.”

  He smiles, his eyes puffy. “That sounds like Lee.”

  I snort. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m pretty high on meds right now, but I think I’ll be okay. What about you?”

  I shrug. My hands are bandaged, and my leg barely has any strength, but it isn’t my physical wounds that worry me. “I’m not doing so well,” I admit.

  Cole opens his arms, inviting me closer, but I’m not sure I can let him hold me. I’m not the girl he thinks he loves. How is he going to feel when he finds out the truth about what Lachlan did to me?

  “Come here,” he says, reaching for me. He slips a hand around my arm, tugging me into him. “I know there’s a lot to figure out, but we’re together now. It’s going to be okay.”

  I breathe in a lungful of his scent, letting myself curl in closer. There’s nothing I want more than to believe those words right now. But I don’t know if they’re true. I don’t know if anything is okay. I don’t know who I am, or how I’m going to handle everything that’s happened.

  Cole pushes the hair from my face. “How’s your new panel?”

  I rest my head in the curve of his shoulder, lifting up my arm. “It’s strange—I can feel apps that I’ve never used before. I don’t even know what they’re supposed to do.”

  He smiles, a playful gleam in his eyes. He takes my hand and turns it gently. “Can I try something?”

  “Sure,” I say warily.

  He slides his hand along my forearm until our panels are pressed together, the way I’ve seen him do with Leoben. I let my eyes glaze over, waiting to see a comm or a file, but all I feel is a low, prickling heat in my stomach.

  “Here,” he says, lifting my other hand to his face, tracing my fingers down his cheek. Sparks rise on my skin in the same place I’m touching him.

  “Is that . . . Am I feeling what you feel?”

  “Mm-hmm,” he says, moving my hand, tracing my fingers over his lips. Lines of fire rise across my own.

  “Are you feeling what I feel too?” I ask.

  “Of course, it’s a feedback loop.” He grins and pulls me closer, leaning in to kiss me.

  The feeling erupts across my skin—my own rapid-firing nerves leaving me breathless, shaking as our lips press together. It’s like fireworks—tiny pops of pleasure growing stronger with each moment the kiss lingers until it’s so intense I can’t take it anymore.

  “Holy shit,” I gasp, pulling away, breaking the connection between our panels. “Is this what you and Leoben were doing when your panels were pressed together?”

  He throws back his head, roaring with a laugh that turns into a wince of pain. “No, but I’ve got to tell him you said that.”

  My cheeks flush, my body still tingling. “That’s a hell of a piece of code.”

  Cole grins. “It’s supposed to be used to transfer pain for medical diagnoses, but you hacked it years ago.”

  “I wrote it?”

  “Yeah, baby. You’ve been a badass from the start. It wasn’t him. You know that, right? It was always you.”

  I let my gaze drift up to his, my heart stuttering. The firelight catches his eyelashes, lighting up the curves of his face.

  “I heard everything,” he says. “He wanted me to hear. He patched your conversation through to me, but I think part of me knew even before he told you. It’s going to be okay, Cat. We’ll get through this.”

  “But . . . Jun Bei,” I say. “If what Lachlan said is true, then she’s gone, and you loved her, you—”

  He cuts me off with a kiss. “I did love her,” he says when he pulls away, “and I still do. That’s something I need to figure out, but we’ll figure it out together. People change, and they still love each other. You’ve just changed a little more than normal.”

  “A little?”

  He cups my cheek with one hand, his ice-blue eyes roaming over my face. “You’re not as different as you might think. I see a lot of her in you. Her spark, her determination.” He grins. “Her continual attempts to kill me.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “But seriously, I see good parts of Lachlan in you too, and there were good parts. You know that. He was brilliant, just like you. But you’re not him, no matter what he said. You’re your own person, Catarina.”

  “Cole—” I start, then bite my lip, turning away as tears fill my eyes. Cole pulls my face to his chest, stroking my neck as I cry. He doesn’t know how much I needed to hear that. I don’t know the girl I was, and I don’t know who I’ll become, but for right now I’m Catarina. I think I can live with that.

  After the tears slow, we lie together silently as the fire crackles and a flock of pigeons swoop and cry above us. Cole’s stomach grumbles, and he presses his lips to my ear. “You hungry?”

  I nod, my face still pressed to his chest.

  “Well, so am I, and I’d cook,” he says, “but I’m an invalid and all. . . .”

  “You don’t want my cooking. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had food poison—” I pause as an icon pops up in the edge of my vision. It’s my comm-link app coming back online. The icon spins as it boots up, hooking into the new joint network Dax and Novak set up for the broadcast. “Comm-link is back,” I say. Thousands of me
ssages flood my vision, their text completely covering my field of view. All my old texts are downloading from the network to my new panel. I rub my eyes, fumbling mentally for a way to make them disappear. “Ugh, I think I’m downloading every comm-link message I ever got.”

  Cole laughs. “You’re strobing out.”

  “Is that what you call it?” I blink again, shaking my head as the words flash and spin. “This is making me seasick, it’s . . .” I trail off as Agnes’s name pops up. All her messages from the last two years are downloading, scrolling across my eyes so fast I only catch snatches of words.

  Got soup . . . You cold? . . . Cartaxus drones . . . up on the highway . . .

  “You okay?” Cole asks.

  I swallow, nodding. “Yeah, I just saw some old messages from Agnes. I wonder where she is, if she’s safe.”

  A handful of messages scroll by from my contacts in the Skies about the vaccine, and then I see Agnes’s name pop up again.

  Bobcat, I’m tracking your father.

  I freeze, searching for the message, but it’s gone. More words flash up so fast I can only catch snippets, but they’re enough to send a jolt through me.

  . . . in Nevada . . . near the solar farms . . . follow the pigeons . . . plan must be stopped . . . Bobcat, don’t trust Lachlan . . .

  “What the hell?” I whisper.

  “What is it?”

  “She’s in Nevada. These messages are from the last couple of days. She’s been sending texts to my comm, but my panel wasn’t working. She’s fine, she’s alive.”

  “See,” Cole says, rubbing my arm. “I told you I didn’t kill her.”

  I should be relieved, but my stomach is clenching. If Agnes was tracking Lachlan, then what is she doing down in Nevada?

  “I . . . I need to check something,” I say, pushing myself to my feet. I hurry to the lab, limping on my bad knee.

  Cole sits up slowly. “Wait,” he calls after me. “Where are you going?”

  Part of me wants to stop and explain, but the rest of me is already gone. I push open the lab’s heavy steel door and weave through the chairs in the waiting room. The ceiling lights flicker on automatically, triangular fluorescents blinking as I limp down the hallway. The doors to the lab are bloodstained, one swinging from a broken hinge. I draw in a breath, steeling myself, and step into the room.

  The shrapnel-riddled body of the man I once called Father sits slumped lifelessly in the dentist’s chair. He sat there the whole time we were talking, barely moving even when I hacked the genkit. He could have tackled me and ripped the wire out of my arm. I know he was wounded, but he still made it to the lab somehow. It wasn’t like he was paralyzed.

  So why didn’t he get out of his chair?

  I replay the moment in my mind, the skin on the back of my neck prickling. For a man who had such complex plans, this suddenly seems too simple.

  Something is wrong.

  I step closer, reaching for his hand, tracing my fingers across his cold, burned skin. Every line of his face is familiar. His eyelashes, his fingernails, his teeth are all those of a man I once fiercely loved.

  But today I learned that looks can be deceiving.

  I slide my knife from the sheath at my thigh and jerk it up his pants, splitting the gray fabric open to his knees. The burns around his feet stop a few inches up his calf, and above that his skin is a clean olive. No blisters, and no burns. No injuries at all except for the shrapnel from the genkit I blew up.

  This doesn’t look like a man who was burned so badly that he couldn’t get out of his chair.

  I stand, swaying, my pulse thudding in my ears. I look over his face again.

  “No,” I breathe. “It can’t be.”

  “Cat?” Cole calls out. “Where are you?”

  My stomach heaves. I spin around, covering my mouth with my hand, and shoulder my way back through the lab’s doors. My eyes well with tears as I run down the hallway.

  “Cat, what’s wrong?” Cole asks when I burst into the waiting room. He reaches for my arm, but I shove past him and push through the front door.

  I stumble out into the grass and double over, my hands braced on my thighs, fighting the nausea rolling through me. Cole’s footsteps sound behind me. The lab’s door screeches open, and he runs to me, his eyes wide.

  “What happened? Are you okay?”

  I draw in a ragged breath. “It was too easy. I should have guessed.”

  “What do you mean? Cat, you’re scaring me.”

  “It wasn’t him,” I say, my voice shaking. “It was a puppet.”

  He stands and steps back. “No, it couldn’t be. . . .”

  I swallow, the dead man’s face filling my mind. Once I realized what Lachlan had done, the differences were sickeningly obvious. The man’s eyes were set too far apart; his Adam’s apple was too big. The point of his chin wasn’t as pronounced as mine. I should have noticed, but he’d been so artfully burned and bandaged that my mind skipped over those minor details.

  I blew up those genkits and killed an innocent man—someone with a panel full of code designed to make him look like Lachlan Agatta. A helpless puppet forced to sit there, trapped in his own body.

  “We haven’t killed him,” I say, choking back a cry. “He’s still out there. This is all part of his plan. We’re still being played.”

  Cole’s hands ball into fists. “We’ll find him,” he says with steel in his voice. “We’ll hunt him down and make sure he’s dead this time.”

  “But we can’t beat him. He’s too smart.”

  Cole turns to me. “No, he’s not. You beat him here, and you can do it again. You have the mind of the greatest scientist this world has ever seen, but you are so much more than him.”

  He takes my arm, helping me up. Overhead, passenger pigeons dart across the sky, their cries echoing from the mountains. Cole’s touch ignites something inside me—the smallest flicker of courage—and I catch a glimpse of a dangerous feeling I’ve kept locked away so long.

  Hope.

  “But I don’t even know who I am,” I whisper.

  “I do,” Cole says. His hand rises to my face. “You’re strong, and you’re brave, and you care about people. You offered your life to release the vaccine, which means you’re nothing like him. He’s wrong about you. We’re more than what our genes dictate we should be. You’re proof of that, Cat. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

  I stare into Cole’s eyes, feeling the earth tilt beneath me, gravity pitching me into a fight I’m not sure I can win. It’s impossible to outsmart a man with a mind like Lachlan’s—even with armies and drones, rebels and hackers, we’ll never take him down.

  But he made one crucial error. One flaw in his perfect plan. He gave me his mind—his intelligence, his cunning.

  It’s time for me to embrace it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To my incredible agent, DongWon Song—thank you, thank you, thank you. From the moment we first spoke, I knew you were going to change my life, and I’m so grateful to have you with me on this roller coaster! Thank you for being my first editor, for seeing the heart of the book when it was in rough shape, and showing me how to make it shine. #TeamDongWon forever! Thank you to Kim-Mei and Howard at HMLA, Caspian, Ben and Sandy at Abner Stein, Heather and Danny at Baror International, and Michael Prevett at Rain Management. I’m so lucky to have such a wonderful team representing me.

  To my editor Sarah McCabe, thank you for your constant support and wonderful notes—some of the best lines in this book were written after you encouraged me to dig deeper. To Liesa Abrams, Mara Anastas, Mary Marotta, and the team at Simon Pulse and Simon & Schuster Children’s—thank you for making me feel so welcome, and for working so hard on this book! Regina Flath, I love you for creating this amazing cover. It’s everything I hoped for and more. Thank you, Michael Strother, for championing this book and giving me this chance.

  To my UK editor, Tig Wallace, thank you for your humor, your passion and your excellent notes—y
ou helped me tighten and polish this book immeasurably. To Hannah Bourne, Harriet Venn, Rachel Khoo and the team at Penguin Random House Children’s UK, thank you for your enthusiasm and continual support. Thank you to my copyeditors, Brian Luster, Wendy Shakespeare, and Sophie Nelson, for your admirable patience with my inability to follow basic comma rules, and for catching so many inconsistencies!

  To my husband, Edward, who has encouraged and supported me through revisions, rejections, deadlines, and moments of frantic joy—thank you. I am so lucky to have found you, and I’m so lucky to be going on this adventure with you. Thank you for listening to my wild ideas and endless science factoids. Thank you for making me believe I can do anything I put my mind to. Thank you for reading this book approximately twelve million times.

  To Lora Beth Johnson. Where do I begin? How can I possibly capture in words what you mean to me? There is a special kind of love that springs up between critique partners whose minds and hearts are perfectly aligned, who encourage and challenge and defend each other, who cry on each other’s shoulders and dance excitedly when the good news finally comes. Thank you for always being there, for always guiding my writing to a better place, and for your endless patience and generosity. You make me a better writer, and a better person. I’m so grateful to have found you.

  Thank you to my mother, Cate, for filling my room with books, for reading to me and encouraging me to craft my own characters and stories. Your creativity and your talent have always been an inspiration to me. Thank you to my father, Brock, for sharing so many wonderful books with me—Vonnegut, Orwell, Adams—and for letting me ramble about writing and publishing. I inherited my love of words from you, and am grateful for it every day. Thank you to my family—Rachel, Ellie, Rory, Corinne, Leanne, Bev and David, Kate, and the Townsends for your excitement and love, and help along the way. Thank you Debbie, Ed and Jeff for your enthusiasm and welcoming me into your family.

  To Karrie Shirou, thank you for your eagle eyes and brilliant mind—this book is so much stronger because of your critique! Thank you Anne Tibbets for your constant support, advice, and friendship. To the incredible writing friends I’ve made along the way: Matt Wallace, Marina Lostetter, Sarah Gailey, Alyssa Wong, Sara Mueller, Alex Acks, Amal El-Mohtar, Kristin Henley, Imogen Cassidy, Kate Ristau, Brianna Shrum, Chris Randolph—thank you for the signal-boosting and support!